" . . . Jen Bervin has
reimagined Shakespeare as our
true contemporary. Her little
poems sing." — Paul
Auster
Read an excerpt from Nets in Web Conjunctions
Poet and visual artist, Jen Bervin is currently
collaborating with Margot Ecke on Measureless as Noon -
an artist book in development with Granary Books. Bervin's
large-scale sewn composites
of Emily Dickinson's fascicle marks have been exhibited recently
in the US and France. In addition to Nets, she is
the author of A
Non- Breaking Space (Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2005), and Under What
Is Not Under (2001).
Her work will be included in an anthology of conceptual writing
edited by Craig Dworkin
and Kenneth Goldsmith forthcoming in 2007 from Make Now Press
of Los Angeles. She teaches at New York University, Pratt
Institute, and Poets' House and is an editor for jubilat.
She was a recently a fellow at The Camargo Foundation in
France and lives in Brooklyn,
New York.
_______
“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
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