“Some souls spin like maple seeds. Some books are as haunted as a hotel. ‘I have found the right magic for this,’ declares the opening poem, ‘and for speaking to the dead without fear.’ Each page of Stationed Near the Gateway turns over like a tarot card, introducing us to its cast: Mary and Claire, Percy, the Proprietor, the Monster, the Doctor, the Demon Hunter. Margaret Bashaar’s gift is in making each character’s desire feel at once elusive and revelatory. Her lyric lines show how even a bruise, in developing, exhibits strange beauty. Humans are ‘full of torn up stamen, / petals chewed to pulp.’ But we are not without humor, as when the Doctor resolves, ‘So I cut open ramen packets with an axe / and call myself a Viking….In every dream, my spirit animal is myself.’ I love the grit and resilience of these poems, which—for all their commitment to memory—are really about moving on.”
—Sandra Beasley, author of I Was The Jukebox
“There are many definitions for occult, but we tend to fixate on one: of, or relating to, supernatural phenomena. That’s as good a place as any for readers of Stationed Near the Gateway to start, but it’s just one beginning. ‘The world is vast,’ after all, and Margaret Bashaar has evoked more definitions for occult than you ever knew existed. Smart and sexy, bloody and beautiful, her poems invite us to explore all that is hidden and concealed—from the physical world just beyond our sight to the symptoms of near-undetectable disorders. ‘Come with me into the dark,’ Bashaar says. Yes, yes. We should all pray to walk so deeply into the shadows and never flinch. Yes.”
—T.A. Noonan, author of The Bone Folders, Petticoat Government, and four sparks fall
“Like the stinging bite of a fresh razor through baby skin, Margaret Bashaar’s first full-length collection cuts into your viscera with elegant, surgical precision. The poems are wet with bloods and their fresh clotted footprints beckon you to follow, all the way to the gateway.”
—John Thomas Menesini, author of The Last Great Glass Meat Million