LR Berger’s latest book came out almost two years ago, but reading it now is still as moving and pleasurable as it was in 2021. I’ve been going back to recent titles and posting poem pages with the consideration that people like reading poems right in the post, and with hope that it may encourage them to visit the previews on issuu.com/deerbrookeditions or go to the Website and order a copy.
And there is good reason to.
L.R. Berger’s work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award and The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She was Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome, and has been granted residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Blue Mountain Center, Hedgebrook, Wellspring House and The Hermitage. Her collection of poems, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry.
Here are a couple of spreads from the book.
You can click on the spreads to view large, and use command + or – to adjust the size.
The wind in these eloquent, elegant, tensile poems is present as spirit, of course; and as spirit it can manifest as the longing or fate of the body (it expires), as intellectual momentum (it inspires), and as power for social justice (it aspires). In all these modes, L.R. Berger both controls the energy as form, and honors the charge of the moment through perception by brilliant perception, breath by mortal breath.
—Stephen Tapscott, author of From the Book of Changes, and more
L.R. Berger 