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.

Barbara Einzig is the author of Color (Membrane), Disappearing Work (The Figures) and Robinson Crusoe (Membrane). She has also translated Russian poetry and from Siberian oral traditions.

"Einzig treats language as a liquid, perhaps as an amber. She is not as interested in disfiguration as she is in the gaps between the words, the whispered voice.... Einzig attend to the landscape we are in with precision and brilliant clarity."

--Joel Lewis, American Book Review


"The technique is gestural, impressionistic, even secretive; sometimes as compressed as the heart of a dark star. Einzig fiercely resists paraphrase and reduction."

--Bill Bamberger, New Pages

"The writing is elegant. The dispersal of the narrative is an important part of the pleasure"

--Janet Gray, The Kindred Spirit

"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