My Animal Eyeball

Praise

Barbara Henning’s deep and quirky knowledge of the human soul—especially woman’s soul–brings us to a simultaneous exploration of the outside and the inside, Self and Other: the macrocosm and microcosm of the alchemists. She takes us far, and so skillfully that we are glad to let her do it.
—Diane di Prima

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, how have we arrived on this blue and green planet, complete with sexual histories and aching with complaints? Barbara Henning’s poetry registers the implosion of emotion, graphs the entropy of relationships. The verse and prose poems in Love Makes Thinking Dark are disjunctive meditations composed of pithy non sequiturs motivated by quirks of logic, love, and language.. . . Each page, “a postcard with a prosy style,” reveals a deconstructed grammar of passion and loss.
—Harryette Mullen

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

What you write : what’s for dinner : the books on your shelves : leftovers. Barbara Henning has prepared us a great meal where the sonnets are even better than the index.
—Bernadette Mayer