Description
Fiction. Poetry. In A SWIFT PASSAGE, Barbara Henning celebrates the ongoing life force and transformation as we seek freedom, clarity, confusion and confinement, and everything in between. The pace of life moves us so quickly and with such an urgency to get somewhere in particular and then we circle around and return to where we started, but it's never exactly the same. Henning's stories and poems blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, prose and poetry. The narrator, and her characters, try to tell the truth and then examine how that truth then tells them. Ultimately, narrator and characters question whether what's told is the truth. There are stories and poems about moments of sunlight and violence, biking in the desert, war, child abuse, the BP oil disaster, water pollution, New York City streets, un-health care in the USA, Tompkins Square Park, writers, driving, Halliburton, government contracts, yoga, divorce, flowers, moving shadows, smuggling, picking raspberries in the wilderness. These works are maximalist in that they intersect with Henning's daily life in New York City and on the road driving across country. Our conscious minds hold memory and experience, the private and the public and endless variations. These poems and stories intersect with these variations.
Author Bio
Barbara Henning's books include DIGIGRAM (United Artists Books, 2020), Just Like That (2018), A Day Like Today (2015), A SWIFT PASSAGE (Quale Press, 2013), LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN (Belladonna*, 2011), and Cities and Memory (2010). Her current project is a hybrid documentary on her mother's life, Look At Me—I Lived: Ferne, a Detroit Story (1921-1960). Henning is the editor and publisher of Long News Magazine and Books. She is also the editor of Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil 2020). Born in Detroit, she lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Long Island University.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA