Published: Left at the Ruin, by Jacqueline Berger
Praise for Left at the Ruin
These poems, these words, they are quiet fires, every one. Palpable feeling comes out of these lines, rendering an intimacy melancholy but celebratory too in their constant acts of self-discovery. These poems are in immediate conversation with the reader, speaking—never shouting—their startling news of the everyday uncovered, or recovered, in stunning moments of feeling: “the sheer joy of being a body, / keeping it up all night.” The poems live true to their insights, traversing some imaginary line: “Give desire a boundary / and it sails across.” Those words speak for the book, but they come with a quiet kind of sadness as well: “All of my ages swarm / against the mismatch of time.” We may know that sensibility ourselves intellectually, but in these poems we are made to truly feel it.
—Alberto Rios, Not Go Away Is My Name
These poems, these words, they are quiet fires, every one. Palpable feeling comes out of these lines, rendering an intimacy melancholy but celebratory too in their constant acts of self-discovery. These poems are in immediate conversation with the reader, speaking—never shouting—their startling news of the everyday uncovered, or recovered, in stunning moments of feeling: “the sheer joy of being a body, / keeping it up all night.” The poems live true to their insights, traversing some imaginary line: “Give desire a boundary / and it sails across.” Those words speak for the book, but they come with a quiet kind of sadness as well: “All of my ages swarm / against the mismatch of time.” We may know that sensibility ourselves intellectually, but in these poems we are made to truly feel it.
—Alberto Rios, Not Go Away Is My Name
Jacqueline Berger’s fourth book, The Day You Miss Your Exit, was published by Broadstone Books in 2018. Her previous books include The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize, judged by Alicia Ostriker; Things That Burn, selected by Mark Strand as the 2004 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize; and The Mythologies of Danger, chosen by Alberto Rios as the winner of the 1998 Bluestem Award. The Mythologies of Danger also won the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize. Several of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writers Almanac as well as in anthologies and journals, including A Constellation of Kisses from Terrapin Books, The Iowa Review, Tar River Poetry, Old Dominion Review, River Styx, Rattle, and Nimrod. She is professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, where, for years, she produced the reading series. She recently moved from San Francisco to the California Central Coast.
Website
Available at
Terrapin Bookstore
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Bookshop.org
Website
Available at
Terrapin Bookstore
Amazon
Bookshop.org
