" . . . 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.

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“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