Return Against the Flow

Poetry. A long poem in two parts, RETRIBUTION BINARY is an unearthing of trauma and its many fractures. Baumann explores the psychological and spiritual mayhem of the loss of body ownership, how one both takes that back and can never take it back: "Hands laid on the body lay still in the body. Ghost leeches parasites of rotten wanting." RETRIBUTION BINARY's splinters dig deep, burrowing also into the psyche of the perpetrator. The text at once humanizes and exposes the criminal greed and apathy in him: "If the body is a crime Hell / His lips solemn His head whole / Her age is an appetite."

In this excavation into wreckage and living with it and inside it, Baumann lays bare the false promise of "after," daring us inside an experience of trauma that defies easy resolution. In fact, it is always recurring, not buried, not cured, but not conquering either. In Baumann's landscape, "The girl asks for a little place to lay her head. She will keep walking after."

"RETRIBUTION BINARY is a study in wreckage and palpable absence. 'The morphology of chaos.' Part dreamscape disjointed, part gutter- bucket realism, Baumann sings trauma in a syntactically ecstatic, trance-like pitch somewhere between punk rock and opera, not to be missed."—Marcus Wicker

"Ruth Baumann's RETRIBUTION BINARY operates in a mode perhaps best described as post- traumatic surrealism, conjuring a world in which 'emptiness is the loudest paper cut,' a city of the mind where 'one thought crosses another like a car t-boning the future.' But make no mistake, Baumann is not satisfied with mere imagistic playfulness; hers is a high-stakes poetry that aims for nothing less than physical, emotional, and spiritual reclamation. Resilient and fierce in their clarity, the poems in RETRIBUTION BINARY leave me excited and eager to read Baumann's work in the years to come."—James Kimbrell

Ruth Baumann is a PhD student at Florida State University & holds an MFA from the University of Memphis. She is also a co-editor of Nightjar Review. Her first chapbook, I'll Love You Forever & Other Temporary Valentines, won the Salt Hill Dead Lake Chapbook Contest in 2014. Her second chapbook, wildcold, won the Slash Pines Chapbook Contest in 2015. Poems are published in Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, The Journal, Third Coast and others.