Love Makes Thinking Dark

Literature & Fiction

Henning, Barbara

Contemporary

United Artists Books

Poetry. A new book of poems by the author of You, Me &amp; The Insects and Love Makes Thinking Dark. "In this witty, post-Oulipian take on you-are-what-you-read, Henning dispossesses, recycles, and levels out the singular lines she lifts from the likes of Bataille, Joyce, or Gertrude Stein, all the way to authors of travel aned cookbooks that sit on her shelves. The resulting seventy-one 'sonnets' sound their orphaned music: 'strangers now, but once we were lovers' with the hidden glee of the artist behind her console, sampling, spinning, shredding, and remixing. My Autobiography is a concept, a mirror, a community: see you there!"--Chris Tysh.

My Autobiography

Poetry

Poetry. "Barbara Henning's DIGIGRAM is unrelenting in its collaging of reality, visions, and thought buds. Sometimes diaristic and newsy, this is edgy poetry that moves beyond the tricks of fashion. An agitated style centralizes the subjects--heartless immigration policies, women's rights, weather, racism, virulent patriarchy, compromised democracy, family, daily life, sex, spirituality. In this book we get glimpses of Henning's assertive and experiential humanism. Pointedly political. DIGIGRAM is the work of a major writer."--Uche Nduka "DIGIGRAM pulses in and out like a telegraphic beacon. Both emotional archive and urgent transmission, Barbara Henning records a daily exchange with transnational historic events, the memories of city streets, intimacies both brief and endless. With each digigram a message is passed between the day and the mystery, the event and its shadow, the poet and the whole world."--Laura Henriksen "DIGIGRAM is an expedition through the uneven rhythms in which we're all immersed, a telegram from our digital travels through the tragedy and the beauty we're all close to at any moment. Languages culled from all levels of consciousness and experience--political tumult, daily routine, newspaper stories, anonymous conversations, flashes of memory--leap across the hyphens that join each thought-phrase to the next. Sensitive, caring and unwilling to accept the injustice happening the world over, Barbara Henning has given us a vital, life-affirming book."--Tony Iantosca "DIGIGRAM follows the path of Barbara Henning's daily orbit into the roar and stammer of the universe just outside her apartment door--the politics of the hour, the wandering populace, the upheavals and intervals of all the treasured ordinary. An engaged participant and insightful commentator, Henning defines her times with riveting staccato observation and claims her place as part of that manifold citizenry."--Maureen Owen

Digigram

“Reading Barbara Henning's poems is always completely refreshing. Perhaps it has to do with that "swerve" between the bumpy pavement under the bicycle wheel and the ring of radiation around the Earth, from the political to the completely mundane. I get caught up in the poem's movement. So deft, so seemingly easy, with an almost folk-art clarity in the weaving, these poems nonetheless make things really weird—I don't get it!—and suddenly I'm in the world, "to be here right now"—how did I get here?” – Matvei Yankelvich

A Day Like Today

Negative Capability Press

Poetry. "After the pharmicist sends the boy to the doctor, he agrees to remove his eyebrow ring. Prior to the witch's refusal to offer a remedy, his mother puts a stake in her womb. In the interim, tangled and indecipherable designs are tattooed on our breasts by big Teddy in Brooklyn." Short texts are presented in between cover images by Miranda Maher in this short book by Barbara Henning. Among the many titles by Henning available from SPD are HOW TO READ AND WRITE IN THE DARK, ME AND MY DOG and the recent novel, BLACK LACE.

In Between

Spectacular Diseases

How to Read and Write in the Dark

Long News Books

You, Me, and the Insects is a heartening, bittersweet story of a spiritual struggle and transformation, told in parallel universes of mother, writer, wife in secular USA and dedicated struggling western yogini in luminously detailed India. The writing is marvelously rich, layered, the narrative is compelling. The phenomenal world is the source of terrific insight, delight and surprise. This is not a pretentious New Age memoir but an ageless picaresque and imaginative voyage. A major accomplishment for this extremely salient, charged writer. Anne Waldman

You, Me, and the Insects

United States

Spuyten Duyvil

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History &amp; Criticism. African American Studies. Introduction by Juliana Spahr. Six years after Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning first met at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, Henning proposed she do a postcard-format interview of Mullen that would allow for a "very small postcard space in which to respond...[t]he idea of cards flying through the mail &amp; overlapping." Thus began what is now LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN, unique collaborative conversations that offer a candid look at the influences, politics, and poetics that inform Mullen's poetry. The conversation expands even further in the second set of spoken interviews that include concerns as far-ranging as the Heaven's Gate cult, Oulipian constraints such as S + 7 and lipograms, syllabic rhymes, and Aimé Césaire. In stunning detail, Mullen and Henning discuss the origins of each poem in Mullen's highly acclaimed collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. For poets and readers of poetry interested in witnessing how a brilliant, singular writer embarks on the journey of generating work to scholars researching the inception of Mullen's poems, this book informs by way of technique and vitality.

Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works

Belladonna*

Bobbie Louise Hawkins captures the sound of the human voice on the page with grace and honesty and allegiance to the music of the way people talk, interact, lie to themselves (and others), make speeches, converse. Her (dis)comfort zone is the fine line between past and present, who you want to be and who you are, and she always knows when to stop. Applause to Barbara Henning for gathering these minimalist-epic tales all in one place, a keepsake for the ages. —Lewis Warsh When Bobbie Louise Hawkins sets out to tell a story, a spell is cast. The entrancement of her narrative and her vivacity for real people in the quotidian of real human situations is impeccable. What supreme fortune to have her voice among us and to have now available this selected prose of her work. A prose Electric with Life! —Maureen Owen Bobbie Louise Hawkins is a remarkable master of the witty understated prose sentence and writes in the lineage of Barbara Pym and Jane Bowles; she is also a fabulous storyteller with a great ear for the "very thing": quip or bon mot. She should be more discovered and read beyond her adoring fans at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where Bobbie presided as a grande dame teacher and consummate genius performer of her work many years. This collection is a terrific revival! —Anne Waldman

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins

HAWKINS, Bobbie Louise

BlazeVOX Books

Detective Sentences is an exciting and challenging collection. Whether in prose or poetry, Barbara Henning's formal inventiveness has given her apparently autobiographical material a power never found in purely confessional writing. Her vision of an unreasonable world (our very own) is very intelligent, very intense, sometimes funny, always disturbing. Harry Mathews

Detective Sentences

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Books by Henning, Barbara