Digigram

by Barbara Henning

Poetry. "Barbara Henning's DIGIGRAM is unrelenting in its collaging of reality, visions, and thought buds. Sometimes diaristic and newsy, this is edgy poetry that moves beyond the tricks of fashion. An agitated style centralizes the subjects--heartless immigration policies, women's rights, weather, racism, virulent patriarchy, compromised democracy, family, daily life, sex, spirituality. In this book we get glimpses of Henning's assertive and experiential humanism. Pointedly political. DIGIGRAM is the work of a major writer."--Uche Nduka "DIGIGRAM pulses in and out like a telegraphic beacon. Both emotional archive and urgent transmission, Barbara Henning records a daily exchange with transnational historic events, the memories of city streets, intimacies both brief and endless. With each digigram a message is passed between the day and the mystery, the event and its shadow, the poet and the whole world."--Laura Henriksen "DIGIGRAM is an expedition through the uneven rhythms in which we're all immersed, a telegram from our digital travels through the tragedy and the beauty we're all close to at any moment. Languages culled from all levels of consciousness and experience--political tumult, daily routine, newspaper stories, anonymous conversations, flashes of memory--leap across the hyphens that join each thought-phrase to the next. Sensitive, caring and unwilling to accept the injustice happening the world over, Barbara Henning has given us a vital, life-affirming book."--Tony Iantosca "DIGIGRAM follows the path of Barbara Henning's daily orbit into the roar and stammer of the universe just outside her apartment door--the politics of the hour, the wandering populace, the upheavals and intervals of all the treasured ordinary. An engaged participant and insightful commentator, Henning defines her times with riveting staccato observation and claims her place as part of that manifold citizenry."--Maureen Owen

92 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

BARBARA HENNING is a poet and fiction writer, author of four novels and several books of poetry. Her latest novel is Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil 2018) and a book of poems A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015. Other not so recent books include A Swift Passage (Quale Press 2013), a novel, Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVOX Books 2009), a collection of poems My Autobiography (2007 United Artists). Two novels, You Me and the Insects (2005) and Black Lace (2001) both published by Spuyten Duyvil . Other works include a series of photo-poem pamphlets; Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), In Between (Spectacular Diseases, England); Me & My Dog (Poetry New York, 1999); Love Makes Thinking Dark (United Artists, 1995); The Passion of Signs (Leave Books, 1994); Smoking in the Twilight Bar (United Artists, l988). Poems and stories have been published in many magazines, including Poetry International, the Paris Review, Fiction International, The Brooklyn Rail, The World, Talisman, Lingo, Shiny, Not Enough Night, Hanging Loose and others. During the early nineties, she was the editor of Long News in the Short Century, a journal of art and writing. She was born in Detroit, relocated to New York City in the early eighties. She is presently teaching for Long Island University where she is Professor Emerita, as well as for writers.com.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

These seemingly simple reflections, observations, thoughts, and memories are woven together in a way that creates surprises and epiphanies. Barbara Henning has been developing her unique style of prose poems for her whole career, in a voice that is convincing, clear, and consummate. She touches all the touchstones from politics to age, ancestry, and sex. "you stuck your tongue in my mouth."
This poet's tongue will get stuck in your brain. Welcome Digigram, from the late Lewis Warsh's United Artists Books, (whose similar diaristic notebook style is equally seamless and consuming). Like strings of haiku, like beads of light.
DIG! The title is revealing about the process. A wonderfully engaging work, supremely crafted and deceptively intimate.