A Day Like Today

Praise

“Reading Barbara Henning's poems is always completely refreshing. Perhaps it has to do with that "swerve" between the bumpy pavement under the bicycle wheel and the ring of radiation around the Earth, from the political to the completely mundane. I get caught up in the poem's movement. So deft, so seemingly easy, with an almost folk-art clarity in the weaving, these poems nonetheless make things really weird—I don't get it!—and suddenly I'm in the world, "to be here right now"—how did I get here?”
—Matvei Yankelevich

“Swerving continuously from a precise presence to its reverberating context, 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. 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

“Barbara Henning’s quick & patient poems beautifully render time by speaking precisely from that irreducible zone where inner mind merges with on-going perception. They glimpse, figure, observe, report, and continuously feel their measure through an ever-turning line, the action of which parallels the steady hum of the public and private spaces — and bodies —  she so exquisitely brings to light.”  
— Anselm Berrigan

Reviews

• Review by Jim Feast, Otter Magazine, 2015, Issue 6
  “I’m talking about her ability [IN A DAY LIKE TODAY] to shift her view of the world so fundamentally, by imbricating some perspectives from India, so that even a person who lives at the center of a world empire, can think and write with a moral trueness.”

• Review by Jon Curley at Hyperallergic (August 8, 2015)

• Review by Tyrone Williams, American Book Review (Vol. 37, No. 1, Nov/Dec 2015)

• Review by Rob McClennan (June 27, 2015)

Introduction

Joe Elliot at Lofty Pigeon reading 9/11/2025:

“Here We Are” ends, “My husband often had a bloody nose./ Maybe we’ll find each other/ in another life. When I think of/ losing my children, I feel my body/ crack into pieces. China’s cracking/ down on subversive meditating/ disciples of the Dalai Lama. / Be thankful for now, Barbara./ Today. This minute. Here we are.” For the 24/7 poet, and Henning is a 24/7 poet, the day is enough, the hour is enough, the moment is enough. As the 24/7 poet goes out into the world, to the pharmacy or bodega or work, when they get on the bus or the train or on their bike, whatever they witness both in and out of their head and heart, begins to daisy chain, forming a community of meditators and immigrants and dozing laborers and funny old women and dead husbands and wayward children and bloody noses and indignation and vulnerability and steadfastness, always steadfastness in this witnessing, and all of it in the day, in the moment. And the reader, too, likewise daisy-chained by poetry to this ever-expanding community, this hand-holding, this forming a circle, this mutually identifiable and affirming humanity, receives what they need. Please welcome Barbara Henning.