Valerie Bandura
Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Valerie Bandura is the author of Human Interest (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and Freak Show (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), a Brittingham Poetry Prize runner-up and 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, and others, and a forthcoming in the craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma. She received the Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Grant, and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College, the James Merrill Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, a residency from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches writing at Arizona State University.
Books
Freak Show
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Staged in the space between utterance and mother tongue, Bandura’s poems recognize the limits of language while embracing it as recourse, offering us a boy “burning the hunger out of his mouth” and a girl ” tasting each syllable with her spit.” Bandura’s Freak Show is a book of power and a book of movement.
— Beth Bachmann, author of Cease
Valerie Bandura’s Freak Show is an investigation of alienation and resilience; social history pushes against personal history. The cost of prejudice and the impotence of family love are central preoccupations in poems that speak in conventional tones charged with song. Bandura’s poems open out and out. Pain and pleasure are in mortal combat, and “it’s hard not to tell / in the ecstatic hysteria between the two.”
— Catherine Barnett, author of Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space
Valerie Bandura’s clean, crafted, headlong-into-the-breach poems are scary in their intensity. They are full of the violence of history, and Europe, and family, and motherhood, and bodies, and fate. Reader, there is a little hell in them, and a ferocious desire for truth, which is to say, their speaker is engaged in the brace, sometimes, appalling struggle to turn into a human being.
— Tony Hoagland
Bandura gives us a world in between that permeates this hard-hitting collection. Jewish immigrants pack up their lives into one or two suitcases, they sneak the Torah away hidden in strollers, and they dress young boys in old women’s clothing to hide in plain sight. The voice brings us in; the images make us want to look away. It is a remarkable achievement on Bandura’s part to play out this tightrope between style and content. She has us. She has us from the first poem, “Asking For It,” and she’s not about to let us go until all the freaks in the show have paraded out to horrify us and, perhaps, cause us to look at our own selves a bit differently.
— Luanne Smith, American Book Review
In Freak Show, Bandura exhibits the raw emotion of the horrors the Jewish had to encounter during the cold war, and how they were pushed out of the former Soviet Union. She sets up a theme throughout her poems, giving distinct and sorrowful details of how throughout the years, the newest generations of Jews did not understand why they were being pushed out of these countries, writing that “We had no idea why we were running, why we were the chosen, then chosen to leave. With us it was simple; we were chased so we ran.”
— Chelsea Brolgi, Superstition Review
Human Interest
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Bandura’s poems make me cry. They reach into my pithy little heart and rip it our of my chest. She writes about Black Sabbath and guns and children and bad fathers and nutty sisters and Facebook and beautiful husbands and none of the language wants to pretend. She’s saying Come here. Come closer. I want to whisper something in your ear. But, it’s the ear of the world, of humanity.
— Matthew Lippman, author of We Are All Sleeping with our Sneakers On
In Human Interest, Valerie Bandura hurls us through a landscape of birds falling from the sky, game shows and Kardashians. She shows us “a parched landscape / of strip malls, asphalt, and extended cab pickups / with wrap around decals.” Here is a place where “Nobody’s crazy. / And everyone is.” With a searing eye toward contemporary culture, Bandura gives us a glimpse of America at its strangest. This is a wild and harrowing book for a wild and harrowing time.
— Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
“When the Kardashians talk/at once at each other/I hear an aria/to the first-person pronoun, an icon/as sleek as the four-inch stilettos,” Valerie Bandura writes early in her latest poetry collection, Human Interest. As a poet, her lens is trained on the America where millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and dream of game-show winnings even as television and our social media peddle visions of unobtainable celebrity.
— Zack Ravas, ZYZZYVA
Valerie Bandura’s Human Interest isa profound meditation on the brokenness of humanity. These meditations hold no pretense or artifice. They are direct, pop-culture idiosyncratic punches to the mouth of the ears. No one is safe or sacred in these poems, America becomes “The Biggest Baby Ever” a Bandura writes, “hurray / for being the least loved celebrity / on channel you can’t pronounce / in places you won’t dare go, famous / for being the freakishly loud.”
— Joel Salcido, Hayden’s Ferry Review
Poems
“Breathing Ground”: The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, by Jehanne Dubrow (UNM Press, Fall 2025)
Minyan: “Long Division” (June 2025)
The Nu Review: “Exit Plan,” “9mm,” “Soviet Lessons” (2025)
The Adriot Journal: A Review of Hadara Bar-Nadav’s The Animal is Chemical (2024)
Love’s Executive Order: “First It Was Sad, Then It Got Bad” (2020)
Goliad Review: “We Need More Data” and “Amber Alert” (2018)
Love’s Executive Order: “Don’t Get Me Wrong, I Love a Good Wall” (2017)
Verse Daily: “Evil” (2017)
American Poetry Review: “Would You Like Some Cheese with That,”“Money Is Everything,” “Evil,” “All Points Bulletin,” “Mama Money,” “What a Peach,” and “While You Were Out” (2015, 2016)
Gettysburg Review: “Holy Manure” and “Rodeo Good Stuff” (2016)
Waxwing Magazine: “FB is My New BF,” “Not Tag But War,” “Poor Lonely Irony” (2015)
ZYZZYVA: “JC Loves the Gays” and “Tell Me Something” (2014)
Verse Daily: “Now you See It Now You Don’t” (2014)
Honest Pint No. 8 Broadside (edited by Matthew Dickman), Tavern Books Publishing: “There’s Always a Gunman” (2013)
The Minnesota Review: “Step Right Up” (2012)
Ploughshares: “Two Weeks” (2012, Pushcart Prize nomination)
Alaska Quarterly Review: “Jews for Jesus” and “Carnage” (2012)
Cimarron Review: “Ka-Boom” and “Head” (2011)
Mid-American Review: “A New Car” and “Two-Headed Child” (2008)
The Asheville Poetry Review: “Sweet Onion” (2007)
Prairie Schooner: “Fun and Games” (2007)
HeartStone: “Lou Cataldie: Louisiana Coroner” (2007)
Third Coast: “Freak Show” (2007)
Folio: “Baruch Atah Adonai” (2006)
Soundings East: “Asking for It” (2006)
Beloit Poetry Journal: “Speak the Slavic” (2006)
River Styx: “Cottonboob” (2006)
Agenda [England]: “Goodman’s Anthem” and “The Found Word” (2006)
Best New Poets of 2005 (edited by George Garrett): “Vagina and Cross-Cocks” (2006)
Poet Lore: “How We Came to Be” (2005)
Cimarron Review: “Mother Tongue” (2005)
The Greensboro Review: “Drive-In” (2004)
Hubbub: “Two Notes” (2003; Winner of the Kenneth O. Hanson Award)
Crazyhorse: “Now You See It Now You Don’t” (2002)
The Comstock Review: “Deadnettle and Its Rival, The Yellow Archangel” (1999)
The Lucid Stone: “An Elegy” (1999)
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Valerie Bandura 