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.
"This is a must-have book for readers of poetry."- Publishers
Weekly, starred review
Ben Berman's wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a
masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for
difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground.
Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye
for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what's most
impressive about this terrific book is Berman's inclusive generous
spirit, the deadly serious imaginative play he exercises in every
line of every poem. This is a book to cherish.- Alan Shapiro
These are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some
flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism, a
word so overused it is often flattened out to a platitude or piety.
But not in this book.- Fred Marchant
Ben Berman's lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual
and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep's
head, the sustenance that follows; disciplinary beatings that
students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade.
Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny
at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow
elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness
that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of
places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts
to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty. I believe
every word in this collection. This is an unforgettable debut by a
powerful and humble voice- Dzvinia Orlowsky
Ben Berman's marvelous first book, Strange Borderlands, chronicles
in startling and unforgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and
his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him,
attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of
poetic approaches-rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free
verse-he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are
as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as
they are intuitively recognizable. This is a compelling poetry of
"strange borderlands where distance and intimacy collide."- Gregory
Djanikian
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