Bøger af Barbara Henning

"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

Calling to mind Basho¯’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan, two women poets in a well-worn Honda hit the road for a legendary pilgrimage in a far-flung (pre-pandemic) landscape of American poetry.Although a road trip across North American calls to mind Jack Kerouac’s youthful meanderings of self-discovery, this reading tour was more in the manner of Basho¯’s late life journeys through the backcountry of Japan. . . . The road trip was in a sense a pilgrimage of reengagement with their calling as poets, and a chance to reacquaint with like-minded friends, old and new, in a far-flung landscape of American poetry. Venues would include upscale bookstores, coffee houses, museums, legendary used bookstores, botanical gardens, university classrooms, art centers, and artist coops—in short, a unique sampling of poetry environments tracing an arc across the Southern States, the Southwest, and up the West Coast before hooking back to the Rockies. Framed as a personal challenge, the poets hit the road much in the manner of itinerant preachers and musicians, lodging at discount motels, funky hostels, Airbnbs, and with friends along the way. Adding a social media touch, Maureen and Barbara created a blog of their tour so that friends, family, hosts, and fellow poets might also share in their adventure. ­—from the Introduction by Pat Nolan

Fiction. Poetry. In A SWIFT PASSAGE, Barbara Henning celebrates the ongoing life force and transformation as we seek freedom, clarity, confusion and confinement, and everything in between. The pace of life moves us so quickly and with such an urgency to get somewhere in particular and then we circle around and return to where we started, but it's never exactly the same. Henning's stories and poems blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, prose and poetry. The narrator, and her characters, try to tell the truth and then examine how that truth then tells them. Ultimately, narrator and characters question whether what's told is the truth. There are stories and poems about moments of sunlight and violence, biking in the desert, war, child abuse, the BP oil disaster, water pollution, New York City streets, un-health care in the USA, Tompkins Square Park, writers, driving, Halliburton, government contracts, yoga, divorce, flowers, moving shadows, smuggling, picking raspberries in the wilderness. These works are maximalist in that they intersect with Henning's daily life in New York City and on the road driving across country. Our conscious minds hold memory and experience, the private and the public and endless variations. These poems and stories intersect with these variations.