Philly Poetry Chapbook Review is pleased to present Paula Bohince’s poem “The Egg of Anything” as our first monthly featured poem from a full-length book for Issue 11: Winter 2026. You can find more poetry in her book, A Violence, available from Princeton University Press.
The Egg of Anything
is holy, molten in its calcium
cup, sun and moon mixed, hot
in its prison, cells’
incentive to fuse firing, no
second to loiter, calling
now to a predator’s jaw. How
the genetic vow is kept.
Jellied not-yet,
hard as thought becoming
belief, little o
in hope or love, un-
umbilical one, cast into air,
mother gone, father
long gone, uh-huh goes your
heart, that dummy yes said from
a soul agog at such splendor.
(This poem was first published by Image. Excerpted from A Violence: Poems. Copyright © 2025 by Paula Bohince. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.)
About the Poem
The title naturally leading into the first line gives the poem that little ‘oomph’ of momentum that is itself part of the poem’s subject, the race of growth vs. predation. The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like. I played a lot with the last word, hoping to land on something one syllable. Maybe ‘awe’ would have worked, but I do like that ‘splendor’ ends on ‘door,’ a way out for whatever’s in the egg to leave its universe and enter the world.
Author Bio
Paula Bohince is the author of three previous poetry collections, Swallows and Waves, The Children, and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.
From A Violence
A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.
Available now: Princeton University Press
Contents
“Managing [my husband’s] pain became fraught in the last week of his life when he could no longer swallow the medications that had kept him comfortable…The poem explores the vulnerability and intimacy found in such a crisis.” Read five poems by Amy Riddell, our first biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Reading the Body.”
Chapbook Poem: Aphasia by Robert Allen
“Ultimately this is a poem of love and recognition, of finding the right words for the right listener, to the one who listens and understands.” Read the featured Chapbook Poem of the Month for January 2026, “Aphasia,” along with a few words from the poet.
Book Excerpt: The Egg of Anything by Paula Bohince
“The poem is filled with moments of ‘O’ sounds and ‘Ah’ sounds, mimicking the O of the egg and the Ah of the open jaw. I like that the poem is compact in its little form, also a bit egg-like.” Read the featured Excerpt Poem of the Month for January 2026, “The Egg of Anything” from A Violence by Paula Bohince, along with a few words from the poet.
Three Poems by Abraham Aondoana
“Instead of providing any solution to the issue, the poem is ready to be open to the ambiguity that can enable doubt, tenderness, and resilience to co-exist. By so doing, it points to survival not as victory, but as endurance…” Read three poems by Abraham Aondoana, our second biweekly poet of the Winter 2026 issue, along with a few words about “Surviving a Country That is Also a Question.”