Kneel Said the Night, Margo Berdeshevsky
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Kneel Said the Night weaves together intimacy, revamped fairytales, 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?”
“Margo Berdeshevsky’s ravishing originality and enchanting voice, which I have long admired, are on stunning display in her latest book. Kneel Said the Night is an unmitigated joy.”
—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“‘How to save a bird-ling or a world? How to save a springtime?’ Terrifying questions like this loom before us all, at this haunted moment ⎯ yet when the night demands we kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky dreams up rare new postures. She starts from ruin, her planet ravaged and her body long past nubile, but spawns miraculous fables, the offspring of Mother Goose and W.S. Merwin. One has the radium-glow of south Pacific bombing lanes, another exhales the toxic dust of Vesuvius, but all nay-say the glowering darkness. A remarkable accomplishment, this hybrid raises a ‘tumult of hands that reach through smoke keening ⎯ call it — salvage — scream — prayer.’”
⎯John Domini, author of the Naples “Earthquake I.D.” trilogy
“As a longtime reader of Margo Berdeshevsky’s poems, I was not prepared for the way in which Kneel Said the Night uses prose to rend a completely new poetics for a writer at the top of her craft. It is a rare, up-close look at all the pieces of a woman’s life rubbed raw with openness. Here, the author acts as neo-Atropos, cutting the work of her sisters/herself into the frayed segments that constitute a truly lived experience. ‘Ok, blonde. Ok, sixty plus. Ok, an emotional centipede, a poet, a vagabond.’ This book is metafragmentary posture which reveals to the reader, and perhaps to Berdeshevsky herself, that ‘[s]he’s hungry & none in her damned kingdom is worth kissing.’”
—Dante Micheaux, author of Circus
“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