Poetry Night

Echolalia, Deborah Bernhardt

July 26, 2007

6:30pm - 8:00pm

Event Summary

Echolalia

"How even to talk about what it is to read these haunted, ecstatic (wily so, calmly so) immensely likable, edgy poems that Deborah Bernhardt has given us? They're surprising, yes. You never know their next step, where they might leap, or return. The language and cadence-fractured, whizzing-of our most wired new century lives in them though Bernhardt's subjects are ancient…."

— Marianne Boruch, judge, Four Way Books Intro Prize for Poetry, 2005

"Not the least of Bernhardt's achievements in this book is to take the well-worn strategies of disjunction and word-play and found phrases and the lyricism and banalities of the everyday and make of them something eminently readable and worth returning to."

— Martin Stannard, "The Question That Has To Be Asked," Stride Magazine, October 2006

"…Bernhardt in the end wins the argument not by breaking structure or cracking grammar, but by making every rule and sound work for her in a way we're not used to-leaving her reader surprised, satisfied."

— Tom Fleischmann, "Review," Diagram, 6.5

"Bernhardt—writing works which threaten to topple almost all the time and then give all the more pleasure when they don't topple, when the poem is revealed to be an architect's holiday, the sense being that of pleasurable rigor—"

— Max Winter, "Round and Round," Fence Magazine, Winter/Spring 2006