Muted Lines from Someone Else’s Memory

About the Book:

Collects 75 poems written by Seth Berg, winner of Dark Sky Magazine’s 2009 Poetry Contest.

– Published: July, 2010 (79 pp., paper)
– ISBN: 978-0-615-35717-1
– 5 x 8

Praise:

“Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory is a heartfelt and gutsy investigation into the human brain’s infinite possibilities, possibilities that remain potential in most of us, but geyser forward from Berg’s consciousness in every poem. Nowhere in this book are we safe from clownfish in strait-jackets, from wizards playing piccolos, from children with ‘fleshy little prods.’ Berg’s world is rife with the nightmares and euphorias of his own relentless imagination, one that is not merely burns, but is fire itself, sweeping the cortex, the hippocampus, the frontal lobe, re-forging the cerebral universe in the most pleasurable manner imaginable. The only thing wrong with this book is the title — there is nothing muted about any of these lines. They scream at maximum volume. They break glass. How could they not when every syllable is so utterly alive? — Larissa Szporluk, author of Isolato

“In these exceptional poems that give voice to that which is ‘speechless and without hue,’ Seth Berg is curious about what is behind ‘the keyhole through which you peer, hungry and thirsty.’ Exploring uncharted territory to transport us from everyday experience, Berg imagines going underground to live with earthworms and speculates about having a conversation with a praying mantis. Sensual detail binds us to his world: he pulls up carpet to ‘sock-surf’ on hardwood floors and navigate the kitchen rapids; his ‘Rock-n-Roll Woman’ traces constellations with her tongue on his back. Humor also permeates the collection. What other poet wears ‘owl-feather moccasins’ when it’s cold and then invites ‘the mice indoors for warmth and cashews’? Again and again, we are led by the power of Berg’s imaginative mind as he entices us to travel to where his poems take us and to expand our vision. In one particularly fine poem, Berg describes a pine cone as a tube of ‘armored tree seeds’ that could be a ‘grenade in the hands of a blind child.’ The memorable poems in Seth Berg’s Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory embed themselves first in our minds but finally anchor in our hearts, reminding us to be still, to celebrate rare moments of communion, to savor bread rising in the kitchen, to listen to a yellow finch even in a world that threatens to drown out song.” — Vivian Shipley, author of Hardboot: Poems New & Old

Reviews:

– “While Berg writes about the inescapable, forward propulsion of life, he also reminds us of the doors that come with it, the blurred lines along the edges, the shape of things, of our memories as they evolve, and he encourages us to push through, a hand breaking the surface of the water, and then dragging, slowly, downstream. The result is a dreamlike, often playful understanding of the things that surround us and comprise our lives.” — Mel Bosworth, Outside Writers Collective

– “A careful & yet driving book of poetry…” — J.A. Tyler, Big Other

– “The mind is a smelly heap of compost comprising our greatest hopes, delusions and sexual fantasies about robots. We explain its function with analogies to computers or other machines, trying to impose a structure on a ghost. So when our bodies and minds start to fail, we panic. We grope about in the dark for a user’s manual, a crossword puzzle or anti-depressant that will put our brains in the order that we suppose it should have. Seth Berg explores this dark space in his first book of poems, Muted Lines from Someone Else’s Memory.” — H.V. Cramond, NewPages

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Toadstool

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Nocturnal Instructions To My Imagination

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Can I Get a What What

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Aphasia