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Poetry | $10
Perfect-bound. 130 pp, 5.5 x 6.5 in.
ISBN 978-0-972768-43-6
Distribution: SPD
"Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing." —PAUL AUSTER
"Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.” —PAUL COLLINS, THE BELIEVER
"Bervin shows us ways in which we might open up pre- or over-determined uses of past structures without erasing them—making the poems all the more complex by their refusal to dislocate. Her Nets is context responsive and responsible, without the knot of lyric-envy and linguistic guilt of many contemporary poems that pillage the past for strangeness, or worse, for an energetic imagination that might impersonate the writer's." —CHRISTINE HUME, AUFGABE
"Bervin's text breaks the urns of the sonnets into their fragmented parts, thus rendering the ghostly whole wholly ghostly." —PHILIP METRES, JACKET
Process note from Jen Bervin: "I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the 'nets' to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest."
NEWS AND REVIEWS
08.11.10 | Interview with Jen Bervin and Nancy Kuhl on the Poetry Foundation website
Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's large-scale sewn composites of Dickinson's fascicle marks and other works have been exhibited in the US, Canada, and France. Her recent books include The Desert (Granary Books 2008), and a non-breaking space (UDP 2005). More work has been featured recently in Esopus and Double Change. Jen Bervin is a 2007 Poetry Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts and has received fellowships in art and writing from The MacDowell Colony, Centrum Arts, and The Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She is a contributing editor for jubilat and lives in New York.
