Bachelor Pad

Bachelor Pad

Rejoice! The young and frighteningly brilliant Stephen Kampa has already given us a stunning second volume of poems. The title Bachelor Pad offers a hint of the author’s winning modesty and wit, but hardly prepares us for the depths of his humanity. None of the perfectly-crafted poems here is funnier than ‘Homer at Home’ or more tragic than ‘Lana Turner’s Bosom: An Assay,’ and along the way are countless other subtly mixed moods. Here is a poet who looks into the existential abyss but sees love everywhere.” – Mary Jo Salter

“Bachelor Pad is a gutsy and brilliant examination of a contemporary man’s single life. Love, lust, and loneliness tangle together, strengthening and warring with one another to form a complex and honest picture of desire in action. For the man who is looking for love in all the right places, ‘You’re yours to damn; / To find your sole reprieve / Takes someone else. That someone is inviting … / Now when the man I hope to be is writing / The man I am.’ But Stephen Kampa believes in love and so convincing is he that we too believe there is ‘A changeless love song hurrying to me, / Ecstatic in the static.’” – Andrew Hudgins

“Stephen Kampa’s poetry features a rich variety of stanzaic forms and a wonderful wealth of verbal ingenuity – qualities that recall the work of fellow virtuosos from John Donne to Anthony Hecht. And in his love for and knowledge of music and movies, and in his bittersweet meditations on romantic love, Kampa may remind some readers of Woody Allen. A bounteous and resourceful writer, Kampa can also speak, as he does in such poems as ‘Wasted Time’ and ‘The Pocket Watch,’ with energetic concision. Bachelor Pad impresses from cover to cover.” – Timothy Steele

Reviews of Bachelor Pad

Florida Book Review, May 2014
“What I found in the depths of Kampa’s poems was more than carefully crafted language or cleverly integrated meter. Instead, I found myself connecting with the expression of insatiable broken-heartedness.
I admit I was skeptical at first about this book so boldly titled, Bachelor Pad. I braced myself, certain to find poems based on a slew of lusty exploits that would make me, a female reader, cringe. But for Kampa, a poet who won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the 2011 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards, the Theodore Roethke Prize, and the River Styx International Poetry Contest, I knew there had to be something more. Indeed, there was. I found no sexy poems, no seductions or conquests, not even a heaving bosom. Instead, I discovered a mournful speaker unlucky in love. The second poem in the book, ‘Plenty to Him,’ starts out: ‘Already there were signs / That they would not have sex or something more –’ followed by poems in which the speaker recognizes what he’s lost upon seeing an ex-lover at a laundromat, or else comes to terms with his endlessly poor luck ‘After you’ve met / The wrong girl yet again.’ Kampa’s narrators are not all about lament and self-pity. Many poems have bright moments of revelation in which the speaker tries to make sense of his continuing single status: ‘That being full depends on who is filling.’ Or, that ‘crumb by crumb we find / Pain is the bread we eat,’ giving him hope to keep looking. Kampa uses the formal aspect of his poetry to do what Linda Gregg calls combining the tools of poetry "with the meaning to make us experience what we understand." Bachelor Pad is for anyone who has ever lost a lover – or more than one – and who seems fated to be alone. For anyone who has ever masked heartache with a shrug and a smile, who doesn’t give up hope, these are poems full of solace. This is a book for the bachelors – and bachelorettes – past and present." – Marci Calabretta

To read the whole of this review, please click: Full Review of Bachelor Pad