Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary.
Paul Auster
Nets
Jen Bervin
January 2004
“I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets’ to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” —Jen Bervin
For a special edition companion poem (letterpress printed, framed and signed) click here.
About the Author
Jen Bervin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work results from poetic and conceptual investigations of material, and research and collaboration with artists and specialists ranging from material scientists to literary scholars. Her collaborative works activate the intersections of art and scholarship; text and textiles; reading, writing, and listening; as well as those of culture, craft, and technology. Bervin’s work has been exhibited internationally throughout Europe, North America and, Australia. Her publications include ten books and artist books, including the widely taught book Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The Silver Book (UDP), but most recently Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented both as a book (Nightboat Books) and as an implantable biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab. Other books include Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems with Marta Werner (Christine Burgin/New Directions), a Book of the Year selection by The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Hyperallergic. Bervin has earned numerous awards, fellowships and grants from SETI Institute (2016–2019), the Foundation for Contemporary Art (2017), and The Rauschenberg Residency (2016).
Praise
Jen Bervin has reimagined Shakespeare as our true contemporary. Her little poems sing.
Paul Auster
Nets has the strange feel of verbal topography: the original sonnet text is a sort of plain that single, select words soar up from like jagged spires.
Paul Collins, The Believer
Bervin shows us ways in which we might open up pre- or over-determined uses of past structures without erasing them—making the poems all the more complex by their refusal to dislocate. Her Nets is context responsive and responsible, without the knot of lyric-envy and linguistic guilt of many contemporary poems that pillage the past for strangeness, or worse, for an energetic imagination that might impersonate the writer's.
Christine Hume, Aufgabe
Bervin's text breaks the urns of the sonnets into their fragmented parts, thus rendering the ghostly whole wholly ghostly.
Philip Metres, Jacket
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Publication Details
ISBN: 978-0-972768-43-6
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 136 pp, 5 x 6.5 in
Publication Date: January 01 2004