Bending the Arch

In answer to Seamus Heaney's Station Island and Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Machu Picchu, Berger unmasks the worldview of westward expansion from architect Eero Saarinen's arch in St. Louis to the Golden Gate in a way that subtly and mystically taps the unconsciousness of the intended audience. When she writes ""We never entered the West on bended knee,"" the impurity of language used in this epic creates tension between discourses and creates a charge or pressure on each sentence that pushes the reader toward declaring an allegiance. Drawing on historical documents, the Latin Mass, and multivalent voices, Berger moves through the anguish of unintended consequences and leads the reader through the ""ghost dance"" of feeling to the powerful Pacific Ocean, which enters human consciousness like a dream. Entangled historical memory, climate crisis, and inverse expansionism compress into a spiritual reckoning to face the world to come.
""In St. Louis for a baptism during the great flood of 1993 (both themes prominent in these poems), Berger looked through Saarinen's Arch and saw all the way to the Farallon Islands. . . . This is 'decolonizing poetry': literate, theologically rich, and densely annotated.""
--Ched Myers, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries
""Rose Berger is doing poetic alchemy in her new book, Bending The Arch. She does it right before us. She is mixing vision with insight, words with symbol, and hope with common sense . . . and coming up with gold.""
--Steven Charleston, retired Episcopal Bishop of Alaska
""How do we look back on the glorious past, once we realize it is not so glorious? In this important book, Rose Marie Berger looks imaginatively west through Saarinen's Arch in St. Louis and into America's past.""
--D.S. Martin, Poet-in-Residence, McMaster Divinity College, and author of Ampersand
""This book is a beautiful, moving, challenging read, a poetry at once personal, historical, spiritual, and political. Drawing in voices from all of these facets of knowing, Berger creates a truly visionary text, one that feels like a discovery, a codex, and returns to the reader by its conclusion both responsibility and power. Berger's Bending the Arch is extraordinary in both its lyric power and intellectual reach.""
--Linda McCarriston, poet, and professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Literature, University of Alaska Anchorage
Rose Marie Berger, poetry editor at Sojourners magazine, is author of Syllables of the Perfect Word (2004) and Who Killed Donte Manning? The Story of an American Neighborhood (2010), co-author with Janet Gottschalk of Drawn By God, and co-editor with Joseph Ross of Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings (2007). She was raised in the American River watershed, in traditional Miwok territory and now lives in the Anacostia Watershed, in traditional Piscataway territory. She holds an MFA in poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.