Titles

Recent Books by Jeff Bernstein

  • The Ancient Ways

    Jeff Bernstein’s The Ancient Ways explores family and memory, a rural life through the seasons, wrought with New England mettle and a subtle sense of longing. Weaving lyric intensity and narrative drive, the poems traverse sandy Vineyard cart-paths and Vermont hills and gardens, skilled in the art of attention. Bernstein is attuned to the natural world in all its beauty and wonder, to the unfurling of fiddleheads, the tenderness of dogs. The Ancient Ways bears witness to grief and loss while holding onto an abiding belief in love—“an improbable / tapestry of light and dark.” I will return again and again to these wise, beautiful, bittersweet poems.

    —Diana Whitney, author of Dark Beds

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  • Nightfall, Full of Light

    Nightfall, Full of Light

    “This collection by Jeff Bernstein places dappled flashes of vision against the darkness of the universe, small glimmers that hint at the grandeur of the whole.”

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  • Nowhere Near Morning

    Nowhere Near Morning

    “Jeffrey Bernstein speaks directly to his readers in a poetic voice that is both raspy and wise. His wisdom is the weathered wisdom of a New Englander, and his poetry grabs you where you live, knocks on your door and invites out to ponder the meaning of life at the local pub.”

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  • Interior Music

    Interior Music

    Interior Music includes some of Jeff Bernstein’s favorite, mostly narrative, poems about the best storyteller he ever had the privilege of knowing—his father.

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Select Reviews

  • "Jeff Bernstein's poems traverse many realms—the least of which might be called the domestic—with a manner that is wildly imaginative and profoundly humane; poetic in the grand tradition. By turns joyful, funny, sad, and wise, delivered in a precise, straightforward voice unafraid of revealing the corporeal authority all of us hold when we remember what it truly means to be alive."

    Juliet Patterson, poet

  • "'Nowhere Near Morning' explores family themes with startling intimacy. Jeff Bernstein trusts his readers! This is not a book about love, but everything within is so packed with the stuff that we leave each poem thinking, 'I shall return!' and, 'I wish he were in my family.'"

    Geof Hewitt, poet

  • "Jeff Bernstein's 'Nowhere Near Morning' comes from a poet who has skidded near life's brink. His near drop into eternity has sharpened the lucidity of his language, his passion for those he loves, and for life itself. He lives in the world of other frequencies, perceptions we are oblivious to in our daily lives. He lives knowing the precariousness of human life. Brilliantly, with startling language, he takes us on a journey of yearning, drawing us closely into human connections."

    Cecele Allen Kraus, poet