Publications

Full-length poetry books:

How I Became A Hum (Octopus Books, 2019)
Buy from Octopus Books

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The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014)
buy from City Lights, Small Press Distribution, Powell’s Books, Amazon
–Sample poems (pdf)

In the tradition of French poets like Francis Ponge and René Char, The Tranquilized Tongue offers a series of prose meditations in the form of surrealist declaratives, each sentence unfolding like an alchemical riddle in which sounds, images, and figures appear, dissolve, and re-emerge to offer a glimpse of a complex unconscious roiling below the surface of everyday reality.

The poems comprising The Tranquilized Tongue propose a unique blend of Persian miniature and habanero pepper. The book is aburst with unremitting predication, each poem a merciless thought machine. —Nathaniel Mackey

For over a decade now, Eric Baus has been one of the leading practitioners of a new kind of poem, one that draws as equally on the legacy of surrealism, the nouveau roman, and even the language poets, as it does on the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier’s forays into resonant sound, the films of Charles and Ray Eames, and the voiceover of Sir David Attenborough narrating our insect and animal worlds. The Tranquilized Tongue speaks to us in a music capable of condensing geologic time into that of a microtonal interval: weird, warped, a little wobbly on its newly-hatched legs, this is a book where the word The will follow you like a gosling. —Noah Eli Gordon

Special objects in our multiple world–from eggs to kings, from bees to caskets, from wings to statues–spawn themselves with other teeming objects in a fertile generation of aphoristic actions calmed by the clarity of prose poems framed as linked short stories. The scintillating tensions between febrile nouns, adjectival properties, and active claims all in their phonemic bliss create an elegant surrealism charged with the primary mystery of Baus’s lexicon. —Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Eric Baus’s fourth book, is his best yet … Made as much of matter as of sound, [the poems are] an acoustical chamber where words, sounds, letters and images are constantly emerging, intermingling, echoing, and changing into other words, sounds, letters and images … This is a world of unpredictable and miraculous change, a world that is simultaneously philosophical and alchemical, an inseparable mixture of factual propositions and flights of fancy … Whereas Saussure believed that linguistic signs were immaterial, Baus posits that words are living beings. ––John Yau (see Yau’s full review in Hyperallergic)

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Scared Text (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011)
–Winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Cole Swensen
buy from Colorado State University Press or Amazon
ebook from Kindle (Amazon) or Nook (Barnes & Noble)

Marvelously sustained and densely rhythmic, this tightly constructed whole is built of parts that, at each level, all the way down to the phrase, constitute poems in themselves. Baus manages to keep a cast of words in constant replay until many of them take on the presence of character, and some emerge as characters themselves—Minus and Iris, for instance—keeping the whole on the verge of a narrative project that remains always just barely out of reach, just barely in another world in which language and animal endlessly interleave. Baus has opened a new literary field: the linguistic bestiary, a new zoo where words pace like fauves behind ever-thinning bars. —Cole Swensen

“Here the street [is] both omen and throat,” and the medium you are moving through is sound, bodily, every inch of it, liquid or crystal. You can hear language splash and break, and to tell what’s true you look at the fork in the seed-syllables, and find that sounds proliferate meaning. These poems tell us how to do things (“how to hand a glass deer a beetle”) in the vector field, where our very utterances pull toward each other with magnetic force. They are models of speed and direction through space, with divergence and curl. They tell the tongue how to do amazing things, and the mind follows. —Eleni Sikelianos

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Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009)
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In Eric Baus’ Tuned Droves, I find, along with elongated lyric, a knowing innocence, a nasty nicety of eye. Such perverse delicacy will call upon wildness, chimed and timed as pure arrests of startlement. In these silent-movie flashes, the poet confounds the distinction between soundlessness and the sound of imagination. Welcome to the haunted house of Eric Baus. —Andrew Joron

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The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004)
–Winner of the Verse Prize, selected by Forrest Gander
–Recipient of The Greenwall Fund of the Academy of American Poets
buy from Small Press Distribution or Wave Books or Amazon

Birds with extremely long necks. Cassiopeia. A sister. A Marco Polo. A somnambulist. A documentary on the voyages of Columbus. A cartographer. Star charts. Young intellectuals in black robes. Jean-Michel Basquiat. More birds and still more birds. A mathematician. All these things appear in The To Sound’s beautifully warped cosmology. This is a stunning book that builds its own world, a world of ambiguous relations and loaded words; a lyrical world that explores the unstated connections between things. If de Chirico was a poet… if Satie was a poet… if Maya Deren was a poet… and if they collaborated together, they might have written this book. —Juliana Spahr

The variously formal, often epistolary poems of Eric Baus’ ‘The To Sound’ slide open uncanny sidewise logics, a sequence of shoji screens in the house of lyric. There are lovely, subtle shifts in the lexicon, too, words replacing the words that context suggests, as pyrite can replace bone. The implications radiate into rich fields of emotive nuance. The book is a sustained, swerving, humming pleasure. —Forrest Gander

Eric Baus has channeled the consciousness of migratory animals, of a collective self, of others, of objects. He has written an open letter from a marvelous land just beside this one, a place of interior wonder and intimate noise. It’s ‘The To Sound’ of course: bent, exuberant notes that will wake you up wherever you are. —Peter Gizzi

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Works included in anthologies:

The Volta Book of Poets (Sidebrow Books, 2014).
buy from Small Press Distribution

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60 Morning Walks: Serial Interviews with Contemporary Authors (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014)
buy from Ugly Duckling Presse, Small Press Distribution, or Amazon

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The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry
(Rescue Press, 2013)
buy from Small Press Distribution, or Amazon

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Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013)
buy from McSweeney’s or Amazon

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The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry
(Ahsahta Press, 2012)
buy from Ahsahta, Small Press Distribution or Amazon

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New Pony: A Horse Less Press Anthology (Horse Less Press, 2010)
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Poets on Painters (Ulrich Museum of Art, 2007)
buy from Amazon or Ulrich Museum of Art

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Chapbooks

THE RAIN OF THE ICE (above/ground, 2014) ordering information
cover image by Brian Lucas

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Negative Noon (minutes books, 2011) OUT OF PRINT

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Bee-Stung Aviary (further adventures, 2010) OUT OF PRINT

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Something Else The Music Was (Braincase, 2004) OUT OF PRINT

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A Swarm in the Aperture (Margin to Margin, 2002) OUT OF PRINT

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The Space Between Magnets (diaeresis, 2001) OUT OF PRINT

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Selected journal publications

3rd Bed, 14 Hills, 26, American Poet: Academy of American Poets, Apartment, Black Warrior Review, Big Bridge, Bridge, Caketrain, Carve, Cloud Rodeo, Coconut, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Combo, Comet, Connotation Press, Conjunctions Web, Crossroads: Poetry Society of America, Crowd, Dear Navigator, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Dislocate, Dreginald, Dusie, EK*PHRA*SIS, Factorial, Facture, Fascicle, Fence, First Intensity, Foarm, Front Porch, Fruita Pulp, Gammm (Italy), Glitterpony, Greatcoat, Hambone, Hobo, Invisible Ear, Ixnay Reader, Jubilat, Key Satch(el), Lumooja (Finland), Lit, Little Red Leaves, Loose Change, Maggy, Newfound, New Review of Literature, Octopus, The Offending Adam, Omnidawn, One Less, Parcel, Peaches & Bats, Phoebe, Poets.org, Quarter After Eight, Saltgrass, Sentence, Shampoo, Similar Peaks, Spittoon, Spoon River Poetry Review, Syllogism, Thermos, Third Coast, Timber, Touch the Donkey, Trickhouse, Turnrow, Untitled, Ur-Vox, Verse, Vert, Wag’s Revue, Wildlife, and others.