Just Then, Just There, my most recent publication, is available on Amazon and at the Green Toad Bookstore in Oneonta, NY.
Capital Ironies is available at the Green Toad Bookstore in Oneonta, NY.
Capital Ironies is a collection of twenty-four poems and short prose pieces, each a walk through some different aspect of Washington, DC: the city’s monuments and public spaces, its boulevards and side streets, its trails and riverside promenades, its famous and lesser-known sites. Beyond touring Washington’s landscape, however, these writings map the deeper life of the city, a life, Bachner writes, “whose blatancies, nuances, and contradictions” he has come to know well after forty years of residency.
Praise for Capital Ironies
“As we walk with this consummate observer of Washington’s grandeur and poverty, of histories colliding in public spaces, we weather pandemic pandemonium at the Safeway, the fallout of 9/11, and the predations of #45. Fasting to lose weight, Bachner gives money to feed a hungry man. He picks up a distracted socialite’s dog poo for her. He plays out fears of being rendered destitute and homeless by a plunging economy, of being run over in the street. In a genial voice beset by the anxieties of a fractured nation, Bachner’s poems and stories take us across the intersections of his life and the life of the city, monumental and momentary alike.”
–Robert Bensen, author of Before
“Capital Ironies is a unique and intriguing look at Washington, DC. David captures the beautiful, the ugly, and, of course, the irony of life in our nation’s capital. It is a timeless and careful interpretation and appreciation of how place shapes us.”
–Julene Waffle, author of So I Will Remember
“For anyone who loves poetry and essays, for anyone who cares about Washington, DC, David Bachner’s Capital Ironies is a beautiful tour of the many sides and times of this city.”
–Lynne Kemen, author of More Than a Handful
“Life, David Bachner knows, is maps, topographic, political, physical, climate, socioeconomic. Capital Ironies honestly maps, with soft gaze and quiet dignity, a man's life. In the first of his poet's walks, David shows us Washington, DC. By bridging, with precise and elegant prose, the city's histories and fables and foibles with his own, he shows us the way forward on solid ground.”
–Vicki Whicker, author of Caught Before Flight
Other Recent Poetry Publications
“First Love: A Villanelle,” WWPH Writes (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, publication scheduled for July 23, 2023).
“Four Haiku,” Sequestrum (November 16, 2021, https://www.sequestrum.org/four-haiku-by-david-bachner).
“Joan Miro-Painting, 1953,” The Ekphrastic Review (January 29, 2022).
“Belated Thanks to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” Silver Birch Press (May, 2021).
“The water is calm, the waves blown into low white crests by slight westerly winds. The sand is clean and clear of seaweed. Pieces of driftwood seem arranged by a painter. Pelicans skim the Atlantic’s surface. The humps of dolphins are visible a hundred yards offshore. Perfect.”
– Excerpt from “Pawley’s Island“
PHOTO: Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Photo by Scott Davis, used by permission.
Collaborative Work
Seeing Things: An Anthology of Poetry
“Hurricane Time,” “Cross Harp,” Cemetery Stones,” “Sheets”. Seeing Things: An Anthology of Poetry. (Oneonta, NY: Woodland Arts Editions, 2020).
The volume includes poems by both well known and newly published authors David Bachner, Robert Bensen, Rana Bitar, Diane Bliss, Jesse Hilson, Liz Huntington, Lynne Kemen, Annie Kuhn, Karen Miritello, Cicada Musselman, M. W. Piercy, Bertha Rogers, Liz Rosenberg, Pam Strother, Julie Suarez, Lexington Swartwood, Mary van Valkenburg, Julene Waffle, Vicki Whicker, Teresa Winchester, and Lisa Wujnovich.
The 135-page book features rural photographs by Vicki Whicker as well as voices as diverse as the many Upstate communities that the poets come from: Franklin, Walton, Schenevus, Delhi, Binghamton, Niskayuna, Middletown, Bovina Center, Hobart, Laurens, Burlington Flats, Otego, Hancock, Laurens and Oneonta.
The Seeing Things poetry workshop met at Bright Hill Press & Literary Center in Treadwell from March 2019 until the pandemic forced the group online, where it meets weekly. The Seeing Things anthology is edited by Robert Bensen, with type design by David Hayes, and is published by Woodland Arts Editions, Oneonta.
David Bachner 