Rice Pudding Poetry Presents L.R. Berger December 16, 2021

                                                                   Click on the cover to order.

This year’s Rice Pudding Poetry Podcast, featuring L.R. Berger, continues December 16 with a show that illumines “the sacred in the ordinary” through poetry and music.

L.R. is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN New England Discovery Award, the NH State Council on the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, the Blue Mountain Center, and Wellspring, and a Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome.  Her collection of poems, “The Unexpected Aviary,” received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. L.R’s newest collection, called Indebted to Wind, was published in August by Deerbrook Editions.

L.R. also received a grant from NH Audubon and the Blue Mountain Center to research, write and live at Rachel Carson’s home in Southport, Maine, which inspired poems and an essay on Carson for the eco-philosophical primer, “In Praise of Nature.”

For 15 years L.R. taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. With the late Palestinian artist and writer, Kamal Boullatta, she assisted in the translation from the Arabic of “Beginnings,” by the poet Adonis (Pyramid Atlantic Press).

L.R. is joined by musician Jon Prichard, who plays Native American Flute for this show. Our Community Readers Elizabeth Antalek, David Phreaner, Mimi White, and Cathy Wolff will read poems they have selected for the theme.

This episode will be published on December 16 and will be available thereafter at: https://ricepudding.podbean.com/

Or find us on Spotify by searching Rice Pudding Poetry.

L.R. Berger’s new book

The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love.
—L.R. Berger

Endorsements from the back cover

The wind in these eloquent, elegant, tensile poems is present as spirit, of course; as spirit it can manifest as the longing or fate of the body (it expires), as intellectual momentum (it inspires), 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

In this beautiful new book, words are unusually alive and active in the poet’s capable hands. A whispered finale meaning finally, a riff on up, and an exploration of the letter P : these are among the linguistic players that address both personal loss and political realities, which L. R. Berger explores with searing honesty, emotional depth, and lyric grace. No precious word is wasted here; you will read carefully and gratefully, and want to read again.

—Martha Collins

Available from Deerbrook Editions

Welcome to the new platform for writer L.R. Berger

Over the coming weeks this site will be under construction. We shall be figuring out organization and navigation options, while at the same time trying to have some informative content.

Eventually what you’ll find here is news about L.R. Berger’s new book, as well as information about her first book, The Unexpected Aviary, a prize winning poetry book. There will also be posts relevant to L.R. Berger’s writing, interests, and experience in the writing community over the years .

About the author

Some words about and from L.R. Berger

L. R. Berger’s work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook. Berger writes of her poems, “The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love.”