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A Swift Passage

About

In A Swift Passage, Barbara Henning celebrates the ongoing life force and transformation as we seek freedom, clarity, confusion and confinement, and everything in between. The pace of life moves us so quickly and with such an urgency to get somewhere in particular and then we circle around and return to where we started, but it’s never exactly the same. Henning’s stories and poems blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, prose and poetry. The narrator, and her characters, try to tell the truth and then examine how that truth then tells them. Ultimately, narrator and characters question whether what’s told is the truth. There are stories and poems about moments of sunlight and violence, biking in the desert, war, child abuse, the BP oil disaster, water pollution, New York City streets, un-health care in the USA, Tompkins Square Park, writers, driving, Halliburton, government contracts, yoga, divorce, flowers, moving shadows, smuggling, picking raspberries in the wilderness. These works are maximalist in that they intersect with Henning’s daily life in New York City and on the road driving across country. Our conscious minds hold memory and experience, the private and the public and endless variations. These poems and stories intersect with these variations.

Interview

Interview by Shelagh Shapiro on A Swift Passage, Burlington Vermont radio WOMM-LP.

Research Notes

Research notes on A Swift Passage. In Necessary Fiction.

Reviews

In her concluding '"Notes on This Collection" Henning speaks of traveling—through love and space," and this is perhaps the clearest and most accurate articulation of her purpose in having composed and collected these shimmering pieces. The love is not only of places intensely inhabited or thoughtfully traversed, it is of people-former partners and lovers, her children, friends kept and lost—longingly remembered and vividly described, yet without sentimentality. Rather, the emotion is a function of the specificity. Places for Henning are not merely names on roadmaps, but histories which enfold us in them: "The water on earth and in our animal human bodies plants lands air is the same water that was here when the dinosaurs were lumbering water sound earth ether moving reassembling to destroy re story call forth again om nama shivaya ...”

At bottom, what Henning suggests is an ecology: "Water flows from the Colorado River to the Gulf of California and Tucson gardens overflow downpour perennial springs irrigation tree-lined rivulet monsoon riverbed barren run dry Stein says that the work of man is not in harmony with the landscape, it opposes it and it is just that that is the basis of cubism.” And this stunning book, in its form and content, is itself a reflection and a demonstration of that cubism, while also reminding us of Olson's further insistence in his Berkeley lecture that the earth remains .. the geography of our being." —Kenneth Warren, “On Henning, a Review of Swift Passage.” House Organ, No. 87, Summer 2014. House Organ

“I can’t afford to not record: Barbara Henning’s A Swift Passage and the Experiment of Restlessness.” “Where Henning’s book proves most powerful is exactly those points where its advocacy reveals the sensitive communication of those tiny decisions from daily life that ultimately make or break our communities. These scenarios hold the power to expose the inconsistencies in how our system of government treats the poor and the powerless. Ultimately, these inconsistencies point to the source of that restlessness seen in Henning’s travels and various writing projects, but the response is not an attempt to minimize or collapse that restlessness. The writing continues it and celebrates a rigorous  writing practice as a way to maintain access to problems that otherwise might shut us down in hopelessness. Henning’s work prohibits us from forgetting the social place that writing can create from scratch.”
—Paul Klinger, HTML Giant, December 2013.

Armstrong, Shane. “Weaving Introspection: A Review of Barbara Henning’s A Swift Passage.” BeYou. November 12, 2013.