Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
MEB
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 Black
Lace by Barbara
Henning
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Eileen
learns
to hold to little else than her body, her diary and her daughter's
withering tolerance for a new life made in the streets of
1970’s Detroit. At the
sundown of the post-Vietnam war era, an unrelentingly pithy
prose style here
mediates a dark and wanton voice crying in the wilderness.
Flirting
with Bataille and invoking Kristeva, Barbara Henning plunges her
beleaguered
protagonist Eileen into the pitch of an existential crisis.
"I want to suffer and laugh,"
says the liquored-up mother of a teen
girl, distraught wife of a humdrum man, and
lover of many a stray,
bruiser type. This is Detroit circa 1970, and late one night
Eileen
skips out, forsaking any desire she might once have had for a regular
family life.
Chapters alternate between first and third person, between
Eileen's "desire" journals
and a poetically inclined narrator's pithy
observations of her downward spiral from
unhappy homemaker to barfly
nymphet. Melancholy dominates. Abandonment
prevails. Black Lace is a
taut slip of a book for the brooding, alienated, soul-sick
type for
whom summer and sun bring little fun. Village
Voice
This notion of pain as a crutch, a
sensory nudge, is dark and well-rendered in the novel.
Henning sketches
her character so clearly that the notion makes sense, seems utterly
reasonable in the context of Eileen's life. The
book fails
to offer
reassurance—life does not
get better—and this separates it from other
books about women trapped in the institution of
marriage. Sadly,
perhaps inevitably, Eileen's trap simply changes form. What separates
the two traps is the notion of choice, both
sexual and
professional. Foreword
Magazine
Refreshingly,
Henning resists happy
endings, and instead focuses on the richer
material of Eileen's
engagement with her conflicting selves, leaving the outcomes of
her
trials with identity beyond the last page. Rain
Taxi
Barbara
Henning
Barbara
Henning was born in Detroit, Michigan. She has lived in
New York City since 1984 and is the
author
of three collections of poetry, Smoking in the Twilight
Bar (United Artists, 1988) Love Makes Thinking
Dark
(United Artists, 1995), Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil,
2001), a novel Black Lace (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001),
a
novel You, Me, and the Insects (Spuyten Duyvil,
2005); three artist book collaborations,
Words
and
Pictures
(with Sally Young), The Passion of Signs (with Georgia
Marsh, Leave Books), and How to Read
and Write
in
the Dark (with Miranda Maher); and two pamphlets, Me and
My Dog from Poetry New
York, In Between from Spectacular
Diseases
(England); and a series of photopoem
booklets, Found in the Park, Up North, Aerial View,
Teacher Training,
Thakita
Thaka, and My Autobiography. A teacher for many
years
at Long Island University, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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