“Electrifying, dynamic, buzzing, rollicking, immediate. A poetry that animates the body and swerves through time and space to meditate on the spiritual, the social, the erotic-grotesque, Ivanna Baranova’s Confirmation Bias offers a compelling reason to think that art might be able to help us survive the doom-pit of capital and environmental collapse. This is a love poem to the sensory overload of the city, the state and nature. Confirmation Bias is a poetry for the damaged condition of the “electric throng of people animals” who feel too much or feel, who cannot look away from the damage that consumes us all.”
- DANIEL BORZUTZKY, author of The Performance of Becoming Human (Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry)

“Ivanna Baranova’s stunning new book, Confirmation Bias, unreels sharp, unruly ribbons of language, relaying poetic signals from a Spicerian “Outside” with Piscean candor and intensity. This is a gorgeous, challenging, transformative and necessary work of writing. I love this book!”
- ELAINE KAHN, author of Women in Public

“Here is poetry as intervention. Intervention in every meaning of the word. Feast upon these enjambments that confirm every bias you thought you had outsmarted. Baranova got there first.”
- MARWA HELAL, author of Invasive species

“Baranova's poems feel entirely of this moment: kind, intimately political, narrated by a mind that knows astrology. This collection is shimmery, bare and strong like an iridescent fish still in water. It made me feel better about being alive.”
- CHARLOTTE SHANE, author of Prostitute Laundry

Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence in support of one's existing beliefs or theories. In her stunning debut poetry collection, Ivanna Baranova excavates notions of evidence, existence, and resiliency in an attempt to transcend the beliefs that demand our psychic reproduction. Desire, affect, anger, and healing collide in Baranova’s metaphysical observations of her lived experiences―feminine conditioning, racialization, Slavic and Latinx diaspora, experimental therapy, and nausea under capitalist hegemony. Whether through the lens of astrology or philosophy, algorithms or substance use, Confirmation Bias considers the obstacles of being, relating, and rebuilding in the face of sociocultural fragmentation and imminent global collapse. The resulting poems are bright with insight, crackling with humour and idiom, and burning with unforgettable intellect, authenticity, and compassion.