Poetry. THE TELLING, a book-length poem, investigates the life-long secret of a woman who believes that, as a child fleeing repression, she accidently killed her mother. "Denise Bergman's second collection of poems is astonishingly original: I can't think of another work that uses something so small to such large effect. THE TELLING is ultimately about time and memory, art and truth, women and birth and death, and it all comes from 'A sepia memory / mildewed, perhaps, or not'—a tiny center around which Bergman's lyrical intelligence moves with haunting power and grace."—Martha Collins  "As scribe to the recounting of a few harrowing childhood hours that would shape her maternal grandmother's life, Denise Bergman examines trauma, suppression, and how the honest mind must sometimes alter truth. This, then, is no simple compassion; as the narrator bears witness to the recounting of a monumental and guilt-laden secret, Bergman searches underneath the told story. In her spare, halting lines and the wide silences between them, one senses a tender and horrified listening, and in this listening an implied counterpoint, a murmur of truths unspeakable. Every object in THE TELLING has a vulnerable, culpable animus. All are witnesses. Bergman's testimony acknowledges the heartbreaking necessity of amnesia."—Frannie Lindsay

The Telling

Literature & Fiction

Bergman, Denise

Poetry

Cervena Barva Press

<p>Poetry. "Fearless, unsparing, Denise Bergman probes a violent, sexual assault to expose the personal and social consequences of ungovernable, masculinist culture. 'Home is the coat that can't keep me warm or dry / buttons and holes I can't align,' the poet declares, struggling to rebuild a coherent self. A book-length narrative poem, THREE HANDS NONE reveals how 'materials for this story' also account for domestic and international tragedies: 'the single-eyed babies born in Fallujah' and 'strip-mined flattened hills.' A single sequence--of narrative, fragment, and image--this original work will leave you breathless, changed."--Robin Becker<br><br>"To read Denise Bergman's THREE HANDS NONE is to inhabit an intimate accounting of a sexual assault in her bed by a stranger that reduced the writer to 'barebones nothing.' The accounting is obsessive, almost Steinian in its use of repetition to render the ripping of self that occurred during and after the event, the long days and nights when she 'sweated inside matted wool terror filthy as a sheep.' The poems that compose the volume read like the raw data of a mind working nonstop to parse the violence that severed her from 'a body once her own.' They collapse the distance between past and present, silence and speech, material and the metaphor, inside and out. The journey is not for the timid; images climb inside and rake your chest. But Bergman's supple intelligence--whose 'home is the range of one's instinct'--and mastery of her craft carry her and her reader through: 'Word on the street is she still lives there.'"--Lee Sharkey</p>

Three Hands None

Black Lawrence Press

Poetry. "With a delicacy of language and craft, Denise Bergman creates and recreates the life of Annie Sullivan, her early years, her passions for light and its textures in spite of her ever-present darkness. The poems evoke a life of hope as well as incredible courage. Bergman's extraordinary poems translate darkness into light"--Marjorie Agosin. "SEEING ANNIE SULLIVAN approaches sight on multiple levels. One sees--quite literally, in beautiful poetic evocation--this great teacher's early years. One sees as she saw and as she taught her famous pupil to see: substituting sensibility for vision and channeling life's need and energy into an all but impossible task. These poems are marvelous and their composite a gift"--Margaret Randall.

Seeing Annie Sullivan

Cedar Hill Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bergman, Denise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bergman, Denise

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bergman, Denise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Telling

Three Hands None

Seeing Annie Sullivan