Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the that pre-orders are now available for Margo Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night. Pulitzer- Prize-winning author, Diane Seuss, calls this collection “a lush, authoritative masterwork.”
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night weaves together intimacy, revamped fairy tales, erotic myth, and legend. Berdeshevsky articulates a composition that is balanced precariously between wonder and horror by merging poetry, prose, and visual art. The result is the fragmented world of a speaker that offers a visceral, lifelong journey of love and ruin. This collection explodes with relationships that are both passionate and complicated: a sick mother and her daughter, an unwanted child-turned-mother, a woman and her desires, a woman and her lovers, a woman and her predators, little boys and their predator. Oscillating between the real and the unreal, Kneel Said the Night renders pain and pleasure in equal parts, with imagery that cuts deeply, yet embraces its reader, asking both “who holds the winning hand?” and “who will save us?”
“Composed of lyric essays, line broken poems, revamped fairy tales, erotic myths, and histories clothed in see-through shifts, wearing Eau Sauvage men’s cologne, Kneel Said the Night: a hybrid book in half notes, is a lush, authoritative masterwork. This Red Riding Hood gathers flowers and details in her basket, and generates revivified archetypes—‘menstrual-colored canary,’ ‘full paunch moon’—that can only emerge from an imagination fed by solitude and desire (and Paris). ‘I’m the woman who asks how close is death, how near is God,’ Berdeshevsky writes, and in this intimate, audacious collection, the answer is very close, and very, very near.”
—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of frank: sonnets
Pre-order your copy of Kneel Said the Night on the Sundress website!
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest collection, Before The Drought, is from Glass Lyre Press, (a finalist for the National Poetry Series.) It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) She is also the recipient of Grand Prize for Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award and the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Her work appears in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, among many others. In Europe and the UK her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, Under the Radar. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, at literary festivals, and/or somewhere new in the world. For more information, kindly see margoberdeshevsky.com.