Bøker av April Bernard

Balancing emotional openness with formal restraint, April Bernard proves once again a poet who "harmonizes the raucous and the classic, the songful and the wry, the courtly and the quick" (Wayne Koestenbaum). Throughout her sixth collection, Bernard searches for "the world behind the world," a spiritual realm of justice and peace, music and grace. The host of saints present in this parallel world includes poets-John Ashbery, Thomas Wyatt, Gerard Manley Hopkins-as well as folklore spirits, animals wild and domestic, and personal ghosts.Mystical, daring, expertly crafted, and ironic, The World Behind the World embarks on a wide-ranging journey through memory and loss to reach "that other world, where nothing human can wreck us." Along the way, the poet conjures lush woodlands and icy oceans, wry conversations with voices from the past, and transformative moments of reckoning and healing. Rising up from despair, anger, and grief, this powerful collection proposes a moving, personal faith.

What is a just response to persons seeking to desist from criminal behavior? In America, over the last several decades mass incarceration has emerged as the prevailing policy response to crime and reoffending. The majority of those who are imprisoned will be released, and those that are released tend to return to communities challenged by high rates of violence, crime, unemployment, and poverty. In these conditions, without some type of intervention, persons with criminal histories are likely to reoffend. April Bernard, through compelling interviews and field research with formerly gang affiliated women, illuminates how through community support and their active engagement in peacemaking work in distressed neighborhoods throughout Chicago they were able to desist from crime, rebuild their lives, and become meaningful contributors to their communities. This book explores the role of community in facilitating the commitment to desist from crime, by offering critical support and opportunities for stewardship. Bernard provides a timely analysis of the transformative potential of a new perspective on criminal justice which incorporates stewardship and community engagement as a fundamental principal in the response to persons seeking to desist from criminal behavior, particularly women. The book combines moving personal narratives with concrete practical evidence to call for an alternative to ideology that supports the existing punitive policies and practices of the criminal justice system and the corresponding lack of interventions and opportunities for persons seeking to desist from crime. This deeply informed, and perceptive analysis concludes with suggestions for alternatives that fit within a transformative justice paradigm.

Moving easily between high and low diction, evoking at once the language of the King James Bible and the sharp psalms of Bertolt Brecht, these lyrics offer a spirituality rooted in the daunting pressures of late-twentieth-century life-living in cities, disease, war, sexual love, friendship, and, always, wandering.