Bending the Arch: Poems - Softcover

Berger, Rose Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1532660006 ISBN 13: 9781532660009

Publisher: Resource Publications, 2019

Synopsis

In answer to Seamus Heaney’s Station Island and Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, Berger unmasks the worldview of westward expansion from architect Eero Saarinen’s arch in St. Louis to the Golden Gate in a way that subtly and mystically taps the unconsciousness of the intended audience. When she writes “We never entered the West on bended knee,” the impurity of language used in this epic creates tension between discourses and creates a charge or pressure on each sentence that pushes the reader toward declaring an allegiance. Drawing on historical documents, the Latin Mass, and multivalent voices, Berger moves through the anguish of unintended consequences and leads the reader through the “ghost dance” of feeling to the powerful Pacific Ocean, which enters human consciousness like a dream. Entangled historical memory, climate crisis, and inverse expansionism compress into a spiritual reckoning to face the world to come.

About this title

About the Authors

Rose Marie Berger, poetry editor at Sojourners magazine, is author of Syllables of the Perfect Word (2004) and Who Killed Donte Manning? The Story of an American Neighborhood (2010), co-author with Janet Gottschalk of Drawn By God, and co-editor with Joseph Ross of Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings (2007). She was raised in the American River watershed, in traditional Miwok territory and now lives in the Anacostia Watershed, in traditional Piscataway territory. She holds an MFA in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

Dana Greene is Dean Emerita of Oxford College at Emory University. She is author and editor of several books on Evelyn Underhill.

Edition details

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1532660006
• ISBN 13: 9781532660009
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 106