Life Moves Outside

Author: Barbara Einzig

Publisher: Burning Deck (1987)

Fables of naming whose tensions are shifts in sounds and intentions and whose paragraph planes may be heard as the advancing contours of one narrative body. A theme of human habitation as dialogue with the life outside it, as this dialogue occurs in language, the word's dialogue with the life of the word, the languages of others, and the mind of the reader. Plot and identity are continually encroached upon by that which they exclude. In the tradition of Gertrude Stein, Einzig questions the adequacy of names and studies the way "what happens" accrues out of the possible and the gradual.

“The power of these poems is in the range of the associations evoked: a deliberate act of the mind, which is both her own doing & a signal of a new age of poets. The offerings of a tuned & generous mind.”

–Jerome Rothenberg