Bending the Arch

Praise for this book

“In St. Louis for a baptism during the great flood of 1993 (both themes prominent in these poems), Berger looked through Saarinen’s Arch and saw all the way to the Farallon Islands. . . . This is ‘decolonizing poetry’: literate, theologically rich, and densely annotated.”

Ched Myers, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

“Rose Berger is doing poetic alchemy in her new book, Bending The Arch. She does it right before us. She is mixing vision with insight, words with symbol, and hope with common sense . . . and coming up with gold.”

Steven Charleston, retired Episcopal Bishop of Alaska

“How do we look back on the glorious past, once we realize it is not so glorious? In this important book, Rose Marie Berger looks imaginatively west through Saarinen’s Arch in St. Louis and into America’s past.”

D.S. Martin, Poet-in-Residence, McMaster Divinity College, and author of Ampersand

“This book is a beautiful, moving, challenging read, a poetry at once personal, historical, spiritual, and political. Drawing in voices from all of these facets of knowing, Berger creates a truly visionary text, one that feels like a discovery, a codex, and returns to the reader by its conclusion both responsibility and power. Berger’s Bending the Arch is extraordinary in both its lyric power and intellectual reach.”

Linda McCarriston, poet, and professor in the Department of Creative Writing and Literature, University of Alaska Anchorage