Silk Poems by Jen Bervin (Nightboat Books, paperback)
Publication Date: October 1, 2017
Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Art. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Finalist for the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. SILK POEMS takes silk as subject and form, exploring its cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities.
In conjunction with Tufts University's Silk Lab's cutting-edge research on liquified silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem composed in a six-character chain that corresponds to the DNA structure of silk; modeled on the way a silkworm applies filament to its cocoon. This poem, written from the perspective of the silkworm, explores the cultural, scientific, and linguistic complexities of silk written inside the body.
"She makes connections between things that most of us would leave unconnected. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence, by curiosity, wonder, forebearance, and vision."—Mary Ruefle
"Silk Poems, in its small, delicate package, is monumental in scope...and also in its wide-ranging suggestiveness...Like all of Bervin's projects, this one is based on the fusion of text and the material world, and on careful, extensive research... She makes 'interdisciplinary' seem too narrow a word to describe the scope of the work, and her singular fabrication of wonder."—Martha Ronk
