A breathtaking new volume from a poet who wrestles with the diabolical complexity of the human heart
Born in New York City, MARGO BERDESHEVSKY has traveled the world. She currently lives in Paris, where she is considering conversations with Madame de Sevigne's ghost who lurks, maybe, in the courtyard. Her newest collection of poetry is "BETWEEN SOUL & STONE" (Sheep Meadow Press/9/2011.) Her book of illustrated stories, "BEAUTIFUL SOON ENOUGH" (University of Alabama Press/ 2009) received the American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Award for Innovative Fiction. Her poetry collection, "BUT A PASSAGE IN WILDERNESS," was published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2007.
Advance praise for "BETWEEN SOUL & STONE":
Each page [of "Between Soul & Stone"] is immaculate as Margo Berdeshevsky wanders with fire from George Herbert to Cassandra to the silence of the sun before the wounded moon: "The pigeon has found a crippled / moon who will not stand again for days. Has / found water's silence / and the winter wren trusts me." Her ways are the fantastic, the pathos of "love's famine," and a mastery of emotion in her Fπrost-deep meditation in "Alone in the Old One's House": "a hamlet's umber / roofs any piper could lead children up / to, any troubadour--lute for a raven." She recalls France of her childhood and now that sustains her wandering world: "Somewhere on the Seine, a motorboat, three/ monks in gray cassocks and life-vests reach." "BETWEEN SOUL & STONE" is a book of measured splendors.
(WILLIS BARNSTONE )
Praise for "BEAUTIFUL SOON ENOUGH":
"Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen...writing with emotional power...woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life. So MUCH verbal beauty, with the eternal quality of the tale or fable." (MARILYN HACKER)
Margo Berdeshevsky understands the diabolical complexity of the human heart, and how eros is a form of intelligence as well as a drive. Writing with lyric accuracy and necessary forgiveness about the turmoils of love, she also declares the 8th Deadly Sin: the refusal of intense experience. (SVEN BIRKERTS)
"Margo Berdeshevsky's "Beautiful Soon Enough" is a thrillingly cutting-edge work of photos and short short stories flowing together into an extended erotic dream that limns the inner lives of women deeply yearning for connection and authenticity. This is a splendid book by a fine poet turning into an equally fine fiction writer." (ROBERT OLEN BUTLER )
Of her poetry collection, JEROME ROTHENBERG has written,"With the publication of BUT A PASSAGE IN WILDERNESS, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world 'barbaric, vast and wild" that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be.' "
Graduated from the High School of Performing Arts, attended Northwestern and New York Universities, she quit for a role in her first Off Broadway play; trained as an actress by Lee Strasberg, she performed in world premieres of Harold Pinter's "The Basement" & "Tea Party," David Hare's "Slag," worked in the companies of Lincoln Center and Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, toured the USA as Ophelia, and was nominated for a television Emmy award, for a country western drama in which she had her head in an oven, but was saved by a neighbor who prayed for her.
Her cross-genre novel, "VAGRANT," will be published next.
* For an in-depth INTERVIEW @ Paris Writers News: http://tinyurl.com/ygc4esc
* Pls visit her BLOG: http://margoberdeshevsky.blogspot.com/
* & For MORE INFORMATION please see :
http://www.redroom.com/author/margo-berdeshevsky
