[Schneberg] will speak for us, hear us, know our secret trouble, our intimate imagery and behavior. She has the life-strength, curiosity, perception, language. To read her is to learn that we survive by caring for strangers. Willa Schneberg is a poet with healing power. I read her with gratitude.”—Milton KesslerThis is the other side of the lullabyequal parts reassurance and warning—the night world where the woman sleeps alone on old sheets, listening as the child listens, for the new and terrifying inflection of familiar sounds, foot-tap, pipe knock and something else: the enormous insistent music of her own waking, the aubade of her own voice.”—Carol Muske

Box Poems/Old Sheets

Literature & Fiction

Schneberg, Willa

Warren, Larkin

Poetry

Alice James Books

Storytelling in Cambodia

Calyx Books

Rending the Garment is a narrative tapestry encompassing persona poems, prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera. It is a series of linked poems exploring the life and times of one Jewish family. It is a narrative more of emotional truths than of facts. The facts are: Schneberg's parents were born and raised in Brooklyn, and after the death of her father, Portland became her mother's home. Her father suffered from agoraphobia, and her mother survived larynx cancer. Afterward, unable to talk, her mother "spoke" through writing in notebooks that were always with her.

Rending the Garment (Mudfish Individual Poet, 8)

Box Turtle Press

A new collection from poet and mental health therapist Willa Schneberg combines these disciplines in a gripping depiction of the troubled history of psychiatric treatment. Poetry is a form of writing ideally suited to the expression of emotion and the most profound and subtle workings of the mind. But what if that mind is shattered, and those emotions in disarray? Such is the subject explored in Willa Schneberg's new poetry collection THE NAKED ROOM, which draws on her experiences as a therapist to take us on a journey through the disturbing history of psychotherapy and the treatment of mental illness, and into the current state of the art and state of the world. What keeps this from being a grim undertaking is the sheer beauty and precision of her language, as in this passage from "Tiny Monuments" describing the urns that hold the cremated remains of patients at the Oregon State Hospital (depicted on the cover of the book in a photograph by the poet): "These tiny monuments to the scorned and unknown, / wear patinas of pink, burnt sienna, ocher, aqua, / and if you look closely you will find / moon craters, archipelagos, frozen waterfalls, / Big Dippers and dunes with lone tracks." The goal of healing that drives her therapeutic practice informs these poems as well, ending in the necessity of love, her closing image that of a long-time couple spooning in bed, "as if we would always / fit that way." These poems, too, fit that way, a comforting reassurance. Poetry.

The Naked Room

Broadstone Books

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Books by Schneberg, Willa