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Readings

Left Hand Bookstore Reading Series in Boulder (with Michael Friedman), April 19, 2002. Introduction by Mark DuCharme.

Detective Sentences

Praise

Detective Sentences is an exciting and challenging collection. 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

Barbara Henning’s Detective sentences are fastened with empathy. Lived sorrow for our failures to connect and a tender knowledge of human potential is the larger sense these discrete and enignmatic sentences illuminate. Like the outline of a body, her phrases impart the residue, memory’s investigative unveiling process, here in this house inside a house/ with a spider tatooed over your breastbone
—Kimberly Lyons

Detective Sentences— This is, as the title suggests, a book of sentences, sentences that uncover with intelligence and grace the web of daily life, whether in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park or outside her mother’s house in Detroit. Henning’s surfaces are straight forward, yet her non-sequiturs and leaps are connected by an invisible web that links strands of ordinary, uncommon humanity to the absurd and the cosmic.
—Brenda Coultas

Barbara Henning’s Detective Sentences seek and house details dreamed, observed, imagined and cited. In stanzas and paragraphs they evoke a complex world—material, spiritual, affirming, and disturbing. Henning’s poems and prose provide persuasive evidence of the insatiably astute consciousenss (hers) that shapes them. It’s a terrific book.
—Ed Friedman

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’s Introduction at Left Hand Books Reading, Boulder, April 19, 2002.

Reviews

In Detective Sentences, Henning maneuvers conventional, “protestant” plain speech as an unlikely foil to her frequent “yogic twists” mediating “ease and disease.” Henning does not attempt structural subtlety in these formal experiments–alternating for the most part between prose patches and verse couplets. The prose is straightforward, pellucid, and all the more noteworthy in that it unselfconsciously fuses dream imagery with journalistic scrutiny. Her couplets shear experience down to judicious reportage in chilling dualities, points, counterpoints: “I sleep better with my head at the foot of the bed / The guy in the next bed is handcuffed to the rail.” “I put oil in his ears…/…you want me // to pick up the check and then nothing / not even a kiss.” “The Trade Center towering over St. Paul’s /Two paper cups with coffee on a bench.” The value of Henning’s experiments, as these examples indicate, is the intensity that appears to be lived out through the brevity if what is expressed.
—Jack Kimball, Faux Press, 1/3/2004