Books
The Day You Miss Your Exit
“She knows irony and wit as well as praise, and her voice, in its exact attention to detail, to what is lost, offers luminous prayer after prayer as she faces the dark music of mortality.”
– Christopher Buckley
“This strong, shining collection is erected over the ruins of loss—the passing of both Berger’s parents, and, along with them, the old analog life of the 20th century. At turns wry, dark, funny, and hungry for meaning, Berger’s poems give new voice to grief and aging at a time when even the ways we remember are changing.”
– Maria Hummel
“Big or small, nothing escapes her attention: a favorite coat, I Dream of Jeannie, the New Orleans’ Museum of Death.”
– Bruce Snider
The Gift That Arrives Broken
Winner of the 2010 Autumn House Poetry Prize
“Is it the precision of description, is it the amused memories of the self at sixteen, dropping acid and tearing up money, or the amused speculation about a girl with a baby at a crafts fair selling goddess magnets? This is an an art that is centered everywhere. It brought me closer to my own center, and it will bring you, whoever you are, closer too.”
– Alicia Ostriker
“Her voice is intense without being solemn, and the tight muscular lines propel the poems briskly forward, ensuring her honesty about limitation never becomes merely elegiac and concessive.”
– Carl Dennis
Things That Burn
Winner of the 2004 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, University of Utah
“Perhaps the most striking thing about Jacqueline Berger’s poems is their humanity. They are humane in every sense—in their empathy, in their frank sensuality, in their certainties and in their doubts.”
– Katherine Coles
“Her probing, sharply-observed poems reward the reader with their moral clarity and their hard-earned moments of illumination.”
– Chana Bloch
The Mythologies of Danger
Winner of the 1997 Bluestem Award and the 1998 Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award
“These are poems of immediate human energy and willful edge, whose voice stays with us even after the book is closed. Always bold and always thoughtful too, the poems offer a smart, compelling move into the speaker’s world of charged moments, sparks, which here are always dangerous and ingenuously engaging.”
– Alberto Rios
“Jacqueline Berger explores the vagaries of desire, the entanglements of the self and the dangerous process of knowing and being known.”
– Chana Bloch
