author of The Goodbye Kit
What if we considered our relationship to nature as an intimate relationship?
Where is wilderness inside a domestic life?
Narrative but elliptical,The Goodbye Kit is awash in lyric that thrills as it laments. Themes of transgression and longing infuse these poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature. Mapping the charged terrain of human relationship, and marked by a feral sensuality, they explore ecologies of intimacy made tangible through both experience and witness. Their impulse is to capture and project beauty and loss, but also view our mutable and tender flesh through “wolf-colored glasses,” revealing us as the beautiful, culpable animals we are.
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Praise for The Goodbye Kit
This poetry is memorable, meaningful, new, and beautiful. Bergland writes of perfection and oddity in tumbling images and shockingly fantastical associations. With wit. With music. There are stretches and risks here, and each works, seeming effortless in its complexity while offering up precise insight. This is truly poetry that reveals the ordinary world, in all its details, to be the strange, scary, miraculous place it is.
–Laura Kasischke, author of Where Now: New and Selected Poems, The Infinitesimals, and Space, in Chains
We are all so impossible: how could we not love / that we can never touch / the giant tube worms inside their sheaths/ gently waving their red plumes in the boiling dark, writes Daneen Bergland, and it’s in the momentary slip at “that”—between loving the fact that we are each so impossible, and loving the impossibility that we can ever really touch—that there is a characteristic crack. Bergland’s poems move mysteriously, often by opposition, toggling between desire for and resistance to the idea of wholeness; between the shape of meaning suggested in story-telling, and the poet’s associative leaps and deadpan landings. At bedrock is loss, felt most keenly in relation to the natural world where, like the earth itself, we are shown to be vivid, strange, and in peril. Listen: The bird outside the window / isn’t really singing, I can tell how taxing it is, / to carve that sound out of silence / with his tiny serrated voice.
–Michele Glazer
About "Animals Invaluable for Tracking the Spread of Disease Will Appear to Us as Angels,"
The speaker in this poem is assertive. She knows her stuff. “A body is just a place to keep your guts safe,” she says, and, “Music has always been good for sad things.” It’s more than the phrases Bergland builds that ring true, however; it is her tone of utter assurance. But the speaker is curious, too, and compassionate, gazing into the face ( the teeth, to be exact) of what must be a very small and very frightened bat, asking, “Do you think we are the stars of animals’ anxiety dreams?”
Charming, funny, and smart, the voice here leads me, ultimately, to new questions about myself and the world.
-Cincinnati Review