About Witness:
Finalist of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize
Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Demon Barber (Main Street Rag, 2020) and What You Wish For (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She is also the author of Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells (Ohio University Press, 1997).
Praise for Witness:
If
specificity is indeed universal, then Ruth Bardon’s Witness is
a debut poetry collection for us all. Imbued with the rich details of life,
these tightly crafted yet generous poems enlarge our days with vision and
grace. “I think of how strong I was,” Bardon writes, “slicing through a world /
where I couldn’t even breathe, / and claiming it as mine.” These are works of
wonder and precision, and whether turning a keen eye toward a solar eclipse, a
truck packed with caged chickens, strange new technologies, or her own
indelible past, Bardon’s poems implore us to pay attention, to bear witness to
the horrors and wild joys of existence.
—Jared Harél, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject
There’s a passion just below the surface of Ruth Bardon’s poems that sometimes
rips its way out, as it does in the last lines of “Near the End”: “I just
wanted to make my voice / into something jagged and sharp / and to slash
somebody with it.” We’re not told exactly what’s going on in this hospital
scene, but we sense the extreme emotion of the speaker. The same thing happens
at the end of “Typography,” in which the good girl in nursery school misbehaves
because after earning only green or yellow lights, she “wanted to know how red
would feel.” But, in “Typography,” and in Bardon’s poetry in general, we’re
more likely to find emotion expressed “by taking the time / to find the perfect
word,” whether the poem is centered on the significant events of family life
and stories of birth and death or on stories of hurricanes, floods, and
Halley’s Comet. Dividing her poems into three sections—Early Years, Middle
Years, Later Years—Bardon is “claiming [life] as mine,” and she claims it for
us too, as witnesses.
—Brian Daldorph, Kansas Poems and Words Is a Powerful
Thing
Witness explores the ways in which the stories that make up
families continue to be written in the margins of our personal stories.
Bardon’s intuition for narrative is guided by a poetic sensibility that uses
images and lyricism to recreate memories and experiences. While time acts as
the framework of Witness, its poems speak to the present moment in
perceptive ways. Nuanced and inviting, Witness teaches us to
see.
—José Angel Araguz, Rotura and Ruin & Want
In Witness, Ruth Bardon’s use of precise spare language and perfect
metaphors captures and penetrates the essence of each subject like the stabbing
of a squirming bug. It is a monument to modern life, full of understated
emotion, excellent and fine. Thank you, Ruth, for giving the world this
collection.
—Ruth Maus, Valentine and Puzzled
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