In addition to publishing novels, Baggott is a highly anthologized and award-winning poet. Her fourth collection, Instructions: Abject & Fuming, was published in February 2017. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Agni, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Ms. Magazine, and read on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and at Symphony Space.

Instructions, Abject & Fuming, Southern Illinois University Press, 2017

A collection of poems that takes on threads of abandoned English and twisted forms to address contemporary culture, faith, and feminism.

Editors Selection Crab Orchard Review Poetry Series

“… Baggott has always been a poet of inventiveness and sly self-appraisal, and these qualities are abundantly evident in her new collection, which is her best thus far. One almost has to go back to the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets to experience her sassy admixture of erotic and spiritual ardor, and her crackling formal dexterity– a skill that is never merely dutiful, never willing to settle for the easy tour de force. During an era of lukewarm and tepid poetry, Baggott offers poems that sizzle—and sear.” – David Wojahn

“For years, I’ve looked to Julianna Baggott’s writing as a map to help navigate the criss-crossed highways of the human heart. But in this deliciously weird and extraordinary collection of poems, Baggott outdoes her distinguished self—creating a world where “the crawfish could outgrow the glass jars” and where “an arm alone dies then tingles back.” How I loved returning again and again to these wise poems that underscore the electric and buoyant bodies, that, on our best days, we all try to inhabit.” – Aimee Nezhukumatathil

 

Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees, Pleiades Press/ Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

A collection of poems in the tradition of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, except written on poetry’s own terms, in a book of poems.

“…Julianna Baggott’s buoyant tour-de-force on the subject of poetry, addresses poem  themselves, readers, critics, other poets, and her own creative life. Witty and surprising, surprisingly serious, this collection has perfect pitch.” — Susan Ludvigson

“Part primer, part credo, part arm-swinging gambol, this wonderful book is resonant with wit and insight.” – Linda Bierds

 

Lizzie Borden in Love: Poems in Women’s Voices, Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

A highly researched collection of poems written in the voices of historic women. 

“Julianna Baggott amazes with the scope of her imagination. Part biographer, part ventriloquist, part genius, she inhabits characters we thought we knew … Baggott’s talent is almost spooky. Lizzie Borden in Love is a dangerous and elegant collection from one of America’s finest young poets.”  – Beth Ann Fennelly

“Formidably researched and gorgeously crafted, Julianna Baggott’s new collection of poems, Lizzie Borden In Love  … is a brilliant book and an essential read for both lovers of poetry and scholars wishing to understand the inheritance of silence that is the complicated birthright of contemporary women artists everywhere.” – Erin Belieu

 

This Country of Mothers, Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.

A collection of poems that arose from the betrayal of motherhood.

Crab Orchard Award Series, Prize Winner.

“Julianna Baggott has a fierce imagination which probes the ordinary details of a woman’s life and lights up both the sacred and profane.  In a poem called ‘Blurbs,’ she half facetiously hopes for the words ‘sexy,’ ‘elegance,’ and ‘bite’ to be applied to her work.  Happily, in this book, she earns all three.” – Linda Pastan

“Against a backdrop of family stories, Julianna Baggott draws themes as sharp as razors. She is an accomplished poet of the eye and ear, of the definitive feminine experience, and her poems of private life are expansive enough to suggest a vision of a political and historical era. If Baggott’s large subject is memory and, especially, its defaults, the clarity that so many of her characters seek to deny is her great virtue. Poems like ‘The Annunciation: Our Mothers at Church’ and ‘The Dead Must Disappear or Join a Story’ might be admired exclusively for their technical skills, but they are also marvelously accessible. This Country of Mothers announces a poet of substantial powers.” – Rodney Jones

“In Julianna Baggott’s This Country of Mothers a distant and uncaring god is always near.  Baggott’s world is haunted by blood, miscarriage, suicide, and family love-and set against the world of the Bible… In these large, passionate, compelling poems, the speaker’s family and the holy family merge in love and suffering-wholly family, wholly loved, wholly suffered for.” – Andrew Hudgins

To receive a free .pdf version of Julianna’s first collection of poetry, This Country of Mothers, send a request here.