Bøker av Ben Berman

Ben Berman's Writing While Parenting explores what it means to pursue a creative passion alongside raising a family, how having children can make a parent both more vulnerable and more adventurous as an artist. Given how hectic parenting is, is it possible to balance a career and family, let alone find two minutes to pee without someone tugging your leg and asking to watch you "make bubbles"? How does one possibly find the time or energy to be creative?Spanning five years, these essays range from humorous moments (the seven-year-old daughter complaining that she "just got kicked in the weenie") to the more serious ones (finding two swastikas etched into the slide at the neighborhood playground). No matter its genesis, each piece thoughtfully examines the overlaps and the dissonance between the creative life and the procreative one. This is a witty, inspired, and illuminating collection for the writer, the parent, or both.PRAISE FOR WRITING WHILE PARENTING:Ben Berman's witty, brainy, soulful look at writing-while-parenting will speak to every parent-and every writer-committed to understanding the way that having kids raises the stakes for-and loosens the reins of-how we speak and write. What we blurt out, what we write down, the letters we help our children form, and those we hold ourselves back from forming for them-all matter. Every writer speaks to posterity, but Berman shows how parenthood brings that message-literally-home.-Elisa New, director and host of Poetry in AmericaWriting While Parenting, Ben Berman's wonderful new collection, is a striking work of wit, wisdom, and authenticity. His narratives read like micro-memoirs: deep meditations on marriage and family in dramatic structures "between song and thought." In addressing daily routines, dinner dates, and making M&M pancakes, these essays, like poetry, intertwine "imprecise meanings and [a] tangling of tones." This collection is as much about parenthood as it is process. For the writer, it is a reminder to see opportunity in every moment. I am enamored with Berman's care and precision with language and meaning. These essays are full of surprises, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary at every turn.-January O'Neil, author of RewildingBen Berman's collection reveals a writer who is an astute reader, one situated within the community of literature, referencing other texts in ways dialogic and fruitful to us, readers of his text. Here Berman knits a kinship of the poetic, the philosophical, the etymological, and the revelatory in essays remarkable for their scope, surprises, and sheer delights. The fundamental kinship of family and its metaphors is the beautiful beating heart of this book, and Berman's skill as a storyteller gives that heart amazing life.-Danielle Legros Georges, Boston Poet Laureate, 2015-2019ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ben Berman is the author of Writing While Parenting, Figuring in the Figure, and Strange Borderlands, all from Able Muse Press in 2022, 2017, 2012 respectively; and Then Again (Vine Leaves Press, 2018). He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has been shortlisted twice for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club, and Somerville Arts Council.Ben has been teaching for over twenty years and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters.

Strange Borderlands, Ben Berman's first full-length collection, counterpoises insights with uncertainties while chronicling the poet's immersion in a new culture. In compelling metrical, free verse and prose poems, Berman provides a vivid narrative of exotic adventures, especially his Peace Corps service in Zimbabwe-the people, the land, and his "struggling with the blurred lines of where things end" on his return home. This distinctive collection can go from humorous to heartbreaking, and is spellbinding from start to finish-a rare achievement.PRAISE FOR STRANGE BORDERLANDS:Ben Berman's wonderful first book, Strange Borderlands, is a masterful study in the power and limits of empathy, of respect for difference in tension with the urgent need for common ground. Beyond his formal and stylistic range, linguistic flexibility, eye for detail, irrepressible wit and powerful feeling, what's most impressive about this terrific book is Berman's inclusive generous spirit, the deadly serious imaginative play he exercises in every line of every poem. This is a book to cherish. ?Alan ShapiroThese are poems that weigh, consider, and restore some flesh-and-blood meaning to the experience of multiculturalism, a word so overused it is often flattened out to a platitude or piety. But not in this book. ?Fred Marchant (from the ?Foreword?)Ben Berman's lyric poems set in Zimbabwe dig deep into the casual and the casualty of daily life: the hammer striking the sheep's head, the sustenance that follows; disciplinary beatings that students, giggly and protesting, could count and count on to fade. Unassuming but wise, compassionate yet wildly, unpredictably funny at times, Berman delivers to us escalating hardships that somehow elevated us toward the sacred; the pathetic harvest and sweetness that comes from the least likely of places. This least likely of places is where Berman thrives, calling on closely observed facts to chronicle the perimeters of tenderness and cruelty. I believe every word in this collection. This is an unforgettable debut by a powerful and humble voice. ?Dzvinia OrlowskyBen Berman's marvelous first book, Strange Borderlands, chronicles in startling and unforgettable poems his sojourn in Zimbabwe and his immersion in a culture that both embraces and exiles him, attracts and reproaches, changing him forever. Using a variety of poetic approaches?rhymed couplets, prose paragraphs, sonnets, free verse?he gives us a multi-tonal description of landscapes that are as elusive as they are inviting, as unfamiliar to most of us as they are intuitively recognizable. This is a compelling poetry of ?strange borderlands where distance and intimacy collide.? ?Gregory DjanikianABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ben Berman grew up in Maine, served in the Peace Corps in Zimbabwe and currently lives in the Boston area with his wife and daught