"Bernard has written a gorgeous, tough, haunting book."—Frank Bidart

April Bernard's idiosyncratic and profoundly emotional voice combines flights of fancy, moral sternness, and wit in broadly explorative poems—from a memoir sequence about the East Village in the 1980s, to "disheveled" sonnets of self-interrogation, to darkly comic hallucinations. Bernard's idiosyncratic and profoundly emotional voice combines flights of fancy, moral sternness, and wit.

"A poet of obvious gifts and power and ambition, unsparing and brilliant."—W. S. Merwin

"A marvelous poet."—New York Times Book Review

Romanticism explores and challenges the central ideas of high Romanticism: the tragedy and gallantry of the individual's life journey, the appeal of revolution and violence, the beckoning forces of Nature, and the estrangement from but constant longing for God. Here is a powerful argument for the primacy of strong emotion. "Ungeliebt" So I offered a bargain: All of it, the books, the papers, and whatever is still brewing in my teapot head- All of this, I said, I will surrender if only I may have the home that I have seen in his face. The answer came at once: No. What lies you tell, and call them love.

"Life sucks, but you can still get a good deal if you're sharp". On this motto hangs the saga of a heroine who makes herself up as she goes along, never looking back. A closely observed and intricate comedy of class relations, here is a novel of suspense and adventure on the stormy seas of New York--a book as smart, dangerous, and winning as the femme fatale at its heart.

Moving easily between high and low diction, evoking at once the language of the King James Bible and the sharp psalms of Bertolt Brecht, these lyrics offer a spirituality rooted in the daunting pressures of late-twentieth-century life-living in cities, disease, war, sexual love, friendship, and, always, wandering. Carrying forward an age-old argument about the existence of God and the paradox of human suffering, they test the barriers to faith in ourselves and in our connections with others, and they explore how doubt can accommodate belief.

"April Bernard's voice is a voice of one crying in the wilderness, but the wilderness is our populated, all too familiar one and her psalms are striped with modern despair, loving, and knowing." —John Ashbery

A brilliant and fiercely pitched sonnet cycle about love: at once passionate, forbidden, and doomed

John Berryman was an unconventional poet, but he must have surprised even himself when, in his thirties, he found he was suddenly compelled to write sonnets. It was an unusual choice--even an unpopular one--for a poet in a midcentury American literary scene that was less interested in forms. But it was the right choice, for Berryman found himself in a situation that called for the sonnet: after several years of a happy marriage, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with the young wife of a colleague.
"Passion sought; passion requited; passion delayed; and, finally, passion utterly thwarted" this is how the poet April Bernard, in her vivid, intimate introduction, characterizes the sonnet cycle, and it is the cycle that Berryman found himself caught up in. Of course the affair was doomed to end, and end badly. But in the meantime, on the page Berryman performs a spectacular dance of tender, obsessive, impossible love in his "characteristic tonal mixture of bravado and lacerating shame-facedness." Here is the poet as lover, genius, and also, in Bernard's words, as nutcase.
In "Berryman's Sonnets," the poet draws on the models of Petrarch and Sidney to reanimate and reimagine the love-sonnet sequence. Complex, passionate, filled with verbal fireworks and the emotional strains of joy, terror, guilt, and longing, these poems are ripe for rediscovery by contemporary readers.

What is a just response to persons seeking to desist from criminal behavior? In America, over the last several decades mass incarceration has emerged as the prevailing policy response to crime and reoffending. The majority of those who are imprisoned will be released, and those that are released tend to return to communities challenged by high rates of violence, crime, unemployment, and poverty. In these conditions, without some type of intervention, persons with criminal histories are likely to reoffend. April Bernard, through compelling interviews and field research with formerly gang affiliated women, illuminates how through community support and their active engagement in peacemaking work in distressed neighborhoods throughout Chicago they were able to desist from crime, rebuild their lives, and become meaningful contributors to their communities. This book explores the role of community in facilitating the commitment to desist from crime, by offering critical support and opportunities for stewardship. Bernard provides a timely analysis of the transformative potential of a new perspective on criminal justice which incorporates stewardship and community engagement as a fundamental principal in the response to persons seeking to desist from criminal behavior, particularly women. The book combines moving personal narratives with concrete practical evidence to call for an alternative to ideology that supports the existing punitive policies and practices of the criminal justice system and the corresponding lack of interventions and opportunities for persons seeking to desist from crime. This deeply informed, and perceptive analysis concludes with suggestions for alternatives that fit within a transformative justice paradigm.