Things That Burn$12.95Jacqueline Berger
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized author of numerous collections of poetry and a former professor at the University of Utah. Things That Burn by Jacqueline Berger is the 2004 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand. In this evocative collection Berger dissects in ardent language and rich imagery the ways that hunger and longing propel us through our lives, offering the reader a postmortem of passion and desire. Things That Burn was the finalist in ther Binghamton University Book Contest, and the Passaic Book Contest. Held After a night of distance, each on our own side of the bed, desire pulls you from sleep, has you prowling the apartment, straining like a dog at the end of his lead. Once they learn the word children apply it to everything— they need juice or cookies, need the plastic soldier, the doll that pees. We learn early that passion is the gravity that holds us to our lives. We move like trains along the rails, plowing deeper and deeper into the story. Rational thought would have turned back a long time ago, look at how we make each other suffer. But sometimes I like to be pinned down, pressed like a flower between the pages of a heavy book, a bit of my pigment rubbing off on them, their weight holding me down. “Perhaps the most striking thing about Jacqueline Berger's poems is their humanity. They are humane in every sense—in their empathy, in their frank sensuality, in their certainties and in their doubts.” Jacqueline Berger is the author of The Mythologies of Danger, winner of both the 1997 Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award. She teaches writing at Notre Dame de Namur University and at City College of San Francisco. She lives with her husband in San Francisco. Reviews |
