" . . . 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'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.
_______
“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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