Fiction

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Poetry

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Detective Sentences by Barbara Henning
ISBN 1-881471-68-3      $12.00 US   |   $15.95 CAN       60 pages



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This is, as the title suggests, a book of sentences, sentences that uncover with
intelligence and grace the web of daily life, whether in the East Village's Tompkins
Square Park or outside her mother's house in Detroit. Henning's surfaces are straight
forward, yet her non-sequiturs and leaps are connected by an invisible web that links
strands of ordinary, uncommon humanity to the absurd and the cosmic.  Brenda Coultas

Detective Sentences is an exciting and challenging collection. Whether in prose or poetry,
Barbara Henning's formal inventiveness has given her apparently autobiographical material
a power never found in purely confessional writing. Her vision of an unreasonable world
(our very own) is very intelligent, very intense, sometimes funny, always disturbing.  Harry Mathews

Barbara Henning's Detective Sentences are fastened with empathy. Lived sorrow for our
failures to connect, and a tender knowledge of human potential is the larger sense these
discrete and enigmatic sentences illuminate. The micro tales and poems of Detective Sentences
never flaunt the whole situations from which they emerge. Like the outline of a body her phrases
impart the residue, memory's investigative unveiling process here in this house inside a house /
with a spider tattooed over your breastbone.  Kimberly Lyons
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.