Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory, by Seth Berg (Dark Sky Books)
Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory (80 pp., now available from Dark Sky Books) collects 75 poems written by Seth Berg, winner of Dark Sky Magazine’s 2009 Poetry Contest.
ISBN: 0615357172
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“Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory is a heartfelt and gutsy investigation into the human brain’s infinite possibilities, possibilities that remain potential in most of us, but geyser forward from Berg’s consciousness in every poem. Nowhere in this book are we safe from clownfish in strait-jackets, from wizards playing piccolos, from children with ‘fleshy little prods.’ Berg’s world is rife with the nightmares and euphorias of his own relentless imagination, one that is not merely burns, but is fire itself, sweeping the cortex, the hippocampus, the frontal lobe, re-forging the cerebral universe in the most pleasurable manner imaginable. The only thing wrong with this book is the title — there is nothing muted about any of these lines. They scream at maximum volume. They break glass. How could they not when every syllable is so utterly alive?” — Larissa Szporluk, author of Isolato
“In these exceptional poems that give voice to that which is ‘speechless and without hue,’ Seth Berg is curious about what is behind ‘the keyhole through which you peer, hungry and thirsty.’ Exploring uncharted territory to transport us from everyday experience, Berg imagines going underground to live with earthworms and speculates about having a conversation with a praying mantis. Sensual detail binds us to his world: he pulls up carpet to ‘sock-surf’ on hardwood floors and navigate the kitchen rapids; his ‘Rock-n-Roll Woman’ traces constellations with her tongue on his back. Humor also permeates the collection. What other poet wears ‘owl-feather moccasins’ when it’s cold and then invites ‘the mice indoors for warmth and cashews’? Again and again, we are led by the power of Berg’s imaginative mind as he entices us to travel to where his poems take us and to expand our vision. In one particularly fine poem, Berg describes a pine cone as a tube of ‘armored tree seeds’ that could be a ‘grenade in the hands of a blind child.’ The memorable poems in Seth Berg’s Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory embed themselves first in our minds but finally anchor in our hearts, reminding us to be still, to celebrate rare moments of communion, to savor bread rising in the kitchen, to listen to a yellow finch even in a world that threatens to drown out song.” — Vivian Shipley, author of Hardboot: Poems New & Old
Seth Michael Berg earned his MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University in 2003 and has since been bouncing around the country teaching, tending bar, sculpting, writing, and occasionally snowshoeing. His poems and fiction can be found in Connecticut Review, Lake Effect, Word Riot, JMWW, 13th Warrior Review, Chiron Review, BlazeVOX, Pike Magazine, Disappearing City Literary Review, and Dark Sky Magazine, among others. Berg lives in Minneapolis with his photographer wife, Ashley, their supernatural son, Oak, and their twelve-year-old English Bulldog, Bob. When not working, Berg can most likely be found indulging his addiction to hot sauce or slowing down somewhere in a forest.
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Toadstool
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Nocturnal Instructions To My Imagination
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Can I Get a What What
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Aphasia
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