"These are poems of immediate human energy and willful edge, whose voice stays with us even after the book is closed. Always bold but always thoughtful too, the poems offer a smart, compelling move into the speaker's world of charged moments, sparks, which here are always dangerous and ingenuously engaging."
Alberto Alvaro Rios, 1997 Final Judge
"Jacqueline Berger's poems make us feel like she's talking directly to us--including us into her conversation. The precision of her language, the urgency of her tone, her skill at negative capability, her scope, make this a great book. She's like a navigator who sails up and down the same river to flesh out the map."
Hal Sirowitz, author of Mother Said
"Jacqueline Berger explores the vagaries of desire, the entanglements of the self and the dangerous process of knowing and being known. 'I am trying to isolate the present/as dancers locate a particular muscle/and work it,' she writes. Her poems 'work' the present with passion and a lively curiosity. This is an impressive debut."
Chana Bloch
Jacqueline Berger teaches English and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Agni, River Styx, The Dominion Review, Rhino and several other literary journals. This is her first book of poetry. She lives in Brisbane, California.
ISBN 1-878325-18-3 (Cloth)
ISBN 1-878325-19-1 (Paper)