Ben Berman grew up in Maine, served in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe and currently lives in the Boston area with his wife and daughter. He has received the Erika Mumford Prize from the New England Poetry Club and Artist Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council. Strange Borderlands is his first full-length collection.
"Because design, alone, doesn't hold weight, /" Ben Berman writes
in his remarkable second collection of poems, "we need concrete
material-the image/ of a bridge over the sound of water." In
Figuring in the Figure, Berman explores the nature of form in its
deepest most complex sense. His luminous details evoke a world of
mutable forms and shapes that suggest the fragility of our lives.
The book culminates with a moving, realistic yet lyrical sequence
of poems about the birth of his daughter. This is a quietly
beautiful book that deserves attention and recognition.-Jeff
Friedman, author of Pretenders
Figuring in the Figure is a self-portrait of a man becoming a
father. Ben Berman writes inside a modified terza rima that makes a
virtue out of clarity and discernment. The influence here of Frost
returns us to Frost's virtues: these poems make points and have a
point of view. Like Frost, Berman is unsparing in his
introspection. He offers us an ongoing philosophy: when faced with
the pain and contradiction of everyday life, "to delay judgment and
contemplate . . . incompatible thoughts."-Rodger Kamenetz, author
of The Jew in the Lotus
Ben Berman's nimble terza rima is the perfect vehicle for the poems
of Figuring in the Figure. Both expansive and structured, the
interwoven stanzas allow him to form and reform probing questions
of identity without ever forsaking a deep musicality. We watch the
speaker ponder mouse droppings, hit the wall in a marathon,
describe the great molasses flood of 1919, diaper a doll in a
birthing class, then try to manage his "tiny fascist" of a toddler
who wouldn't stop until "every bookshelf toppled/ like a/ failed
coup." His observations are enriched with various kinds of
humor-aphorisms, riddles, word plays, and puns. This book is wise
and wonderful.-Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi,
author of Unmentionables
Ben Berman's fine, clever poems are never merely clever. Their
frisky formal play is finally and importantly about the finding of
forms that might adequately contain our feelings. As his title,
Figuring in the Figure, suggests, Berman is fond of double
meanings; indeed, he is in love with all the twists and turns of
language, as well as all the structures that display the pleasures
of thinking. If invention is his inclination, order is his learned
yet sly companion, "a partner," he writes, "the type/ that coyly
invites chaos to dance."-Lawrence Raab, author of Mistaking Each
Other for Ghosts
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