INTERIOR FEMME
In her debut full-length collection, Stephanie Berger cracks the earth open and exposes the “woman inside.” In a sequence of poems that present variations on the Western feminine archetype, Interior Femme visits many unique locales, from cemeteries in Brooklyn to canyons in New Mexico to churches in San Diego, Paris, and Peru. Berger approaches her subjects—mothers, goddesses, whores, daughters, muses, and movie stars—from multiple angles, and through her poems she reveals historical, personal, social, environmental, and artistic viewpoints. The poems offer layered perspectives fused with multiple versions of female representation, as if to underscore the burden of responsibility, inherited shame, and awesome power that comes with the position women have occupied throughout history. Berger reveals a woman critically wounded—representing the totality of the Western feminine imaginary. Lyrically complex, sometimes surreal, and often ekphrastic in style and content, Interior Femme simultaneously offers heartbreak, laughter, comfort, and empowerment.
THE GREY BIRD: THIRTEEN EMOJI POEMS IN TRANSLATION
According to Dazed Digital, “‘Emoji poetry’ initially sounds like a post-ironic gimmick, but in the collaborative chapbook The Grey Bird out from Coconut Books in April, poets Finn and Berger have turned their involved ideogrammatical communication into richly unsettling reflections on love, travel, alienation, etc. Balancing the inherently modern with the timelessly lyric, Berger takes the emoji compositions from Finn and translates them into poems, most of which centre around the enigmatic ‘grey bird’.” Read more about the Emoji poems in Poetry Magazine, Bustle, Refinery 29, and Paper Magazine, and buy the book at Coconut Books.
IN THE MADAME'S HAT BOX
IN THE MADAME’S HAT BOX, published in 2011 by Dancing Girl Press, is a noir, scrappy and surreal portrait of woman in grief. The poems blur the lines between subject and object, reality and representation, between the living and inanimate. Is a shadow animate? Can one fall in love with an absence?