Poem of the Week | October 17, 2016
Erica Bernheim: "Rear-ended"
This week, we are excited to present a new poem by Erica Bernheim. Bernheim grew up in Ohio and Italy. She holds degrees from Miami University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Florida Southern College, where she directs the creative writing program. Her first full-length collection, The Mimic Sea, was published by 42 Miles Press (Indiana University South Bend) in 2012. She is also the author of a chapbook, Between the Room and the City (H_NGM_N B__KS 2007). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, the Iowa Review, and Cutbank.
Author’s note:
I wrote this poem because of two other events which happened around the same time, but not at the same moment: I was reading Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica and I was in an accident last winter with my parents in my car. “Rear-ended” is my attempt at that devastatingly flat voice Gaitskill uses, one which makes it possible to say the most outrageously terrible things about people and places without breaking the reflective surface of the narrative: “The endless beautiful rooms inside the songs—wander through them long enough and their beauty and endlessness become horrible. There is so much, you always want more, so you keep moving, traveling ever more quickly, until you can’t stop.”
Rear-ended
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