Working from a rich personal archive of letters, journals, and poems Bachman carries us into the questing journey of being a poet and a woman; what she calls, “A slender proposition that supports a glittering weight.” This is a memoir that only a poet could write, life reassembled and revisited in the light of old knowledge, and new. From her roots in the Jewish community of Albany New York, to 1970s feminist houses in the Boston area, from her studies in Jerusalem to her studies with Adrienne Rich at Brandeis University, to a dozen places in between, the work is a cultural mirror of the lived experience of women poets in the last 40 years.
"This completely entertaining memoir is about found notebooks and lost houses, about old lovers and new husbands, about the place of words, and the words that live in places, how we find them, how we leave them. Time shifts. Experience accrues. The view out the window changes countries. In Bachman’s hands the present becomes a rich palimpsest of past and future tense."
Barbara Roether
"Both tender and vivacious, this unusual memoir reveals more than what it means to be a woman and a poet, delving into the heart of human desire and its passion for written expression. The dream-like fragments of Thank you for Being reflect the complex paths that entangle our lives and suggest the glory that is found in discovering the nexus of lived experience."
Jaime Robles