Barbara Henning’s deep and quirky knowledge of the human soul—especially woman’s soul–brings us to a simultaneous exploration of the outside and the inside, Self and Other: the macrocosm and microcosm of the alchemists. She takes us far, and so skillfully that we are glad to let her do it.
—Diane di Prima

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, how have we arrived on this blue and green planet, complete with sexual histories and aching with complaints? Barbara Henning’s poetry registers the implosion of emotion, graphs the entropy of relationships. The verse and prose poems in Love Makes Thinking Dark are disjunctive meditations composed of pithy non sequiturs motivated by quirks of logic, love, and language.. . . Each page, “a postcard with a prosy style,” reveals a deconstructed grammar of passion and loss.
—Harryette Mullen

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

What you write : what’s for dinner : the books on your shelves : leftovers. Barbara Henning has prepared us a great meal where the sonnets are even better than the index.
—Bernadette Mayer



On Barbara Henning

Barbara Henning’s Smoking in the Twilight Bar is a book of linked glimpses into urban working lives after dark, and in its presentation and tone it may be unique. Moving from bars to poolhalls to bedrooms, the intelligent and observant guide and narrator gives us a world of violence and sexuality that is understood but never judged. It is a powerful and memorable act of witnessing.
—Charles Baxter

Not since the Metaphysical Poets have there been love poems like these–assembled from a tantalizing collection of analytic lyricism, philosophical speculation and wickedly witty word play. In politics, as well as poetics, Henning cuts across categories with surprising and pleasurable results. By turns piercingly direct and oblique, these poems glow darkly in the mind.
—Elaine Equi

A linguistic funhouse of prose and verse poems where body, language, memory, family/pronoun romance and specklings of body/text speculations merge and undercut, informing and undermining each urgent declarative. . . “Fabric Reins” is an exhilarating example of loosing language via form’s constraint. A range of images and phrases recycle throughout the piece shifting through oulipo-like twists and grammatical transpositions that dynamize an ostensibly simple sequence of events.
—Dan Featherston, Sulfur, 1995

A beautifully evocative collection of lyrical insights on love, and the social and historical framework in which it struggles to happen. These precise, well-wrought poems understand that formal innovation is never more than a function of insight–these are the sort of poems that could only arise from a life intensely felt and understood. Henning knows a great deal about the negotiations that make love possible, or make it fail, and she knows that the most evocative poetry is often that which lives closest to our own particularities.
—Mark Wallace, Taproot Reviews, 1996

Henning’s writing mixes a seemingly autobiographical transparency with a constructiveness that forces us to be aware of the duration between one sentence and the next, as a unit of meaning following the passage of time and mind.  Each sentence then becomes a new context breaking up the naturalness or inevitability of the autobiographical medium.  If her work presents a decidedly feminist update to the inherited Lower Eastside lyric, then the irresolution of her sentences into narrative might also recall the so-called new sentence of west coast language writers, yet in the end, the effect of Henning’s writing is not a sense of disorder and fragmentation, but a feeling of connectedness even of seemingly random and ordinary details. In this sense, at least, her works seems closer to that of the late Charles Reznikoff, in that it is keenly sensitively observed creating wholes, not holes, in which the context of daily life and the meanings we take from it come to have everything to do with each other.
—Mark DuCharme, Left Hand Books, 2002

“In this witty, post-Oulipian take on you-are-what-you-read, Henning dispossesses, recycles, and levels out the singular lines she lifts from the likes of Bataille, Joyce, or Gertrude Stein, all the way to authors of travel and cookbooks that sit on her shelves. The resulting seventy-one ‘sonnets’ sound their orphaned music: ‘strangers now, but once we were lovers’ with the hidden glee of the artist behind her console, sampling, spinning, shredding, and remixing. My Autobiography is a concept, a mirror, a community: see you there!”
—Chris Tysh

My Autobiography is not just a derivative spin-off from William Burrough’s cut-up oeuvre or Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, nor is it just another cento exercise in the vein of John Ashberry’s “The Dong with the Luminose Nose.” It was Oulipo member Harry Mathews who said that “writing the truth means not representation but invention”; in My Autobiography, by way of a deft combination of constraints and supple editing, Barbara Henning has conjured up a sort of truth by proxy by merely letting the language speak for itself in an inventive way.
—Mark Terrill, Rain Taxi, 2007

Who she knows, what she knows, her knowing is voracious and nuanced and delicately aware. Barbara is the master of the mixed memoir. She achieves phenomenal nominal density of specification, texture. She writes the weather and the tide, and she writes in what some say is an unnatural craft and she makes it seem natural.
—Erica Hunt

Barbara Henning puts the present moment into perspective with patient irony and relentless accuracy. As she careens her bicycle through another calendar year, she traces the complex network that connects protesters in Tibet to a child on a swing, or the cawing of black crows to oil deposits in West Africa. In A Day Like Today, Henning adds a global attention to the grand New York tradition of the frank reportage of daily life, making those mundane details refract in myriad sparkling colors. Clearly, she loves the world, and has found a way to do so through language.
—Cole Swenson