These poems from The Passion of Signs were later included in Love Makes Thinking Dark, published by United Artists Books in 1995.

The Passion of Signs

The Passion of Signs is also the title of a suite of silver point drawings by Georgia Marsh, exhibited at the Betsy Senior Gallery in New York City in Fall 1994.

Review

A beautifully evocative collection of lyrical insights on love, and the social and historical framework in which it struggles to happen. These precise, well-wrought poems understand that formal innovation is never more than a function of insight–these are the sort of poems that could only arise from a life intensely felt and understood. Henning knows a great deal about the negotiations that make love possible, or make it fail, and she knows that the most evocative poetry is often that which lives closest to our own particularities.
—Mark Wallace, Taproot Reviews #7/8, 1996

Publications

“Passport to Paradise.” Downtown Brooklyn 2 (1993).

“For Hundreds of Years," "The Grasshoppers Flee," "To Oversee as an Indeclinable," "To Mark Case, Number, Gender," "F Stop," "Fifteen Seconds to Show You How Much," and "Mark the Arrival."  The World 47 (Spring 1993).

“To Oversee as an Indeclinable—” New Noises Broadside series at Café No, Portland Maine.  Image by David Snow. Poem by Barbara Henning. April 20, 1993. Typesetting by Muse Press.

"The Grasshoppers Flee" was translated into Ukrainian Performed in the Ukraine and as part of an experimental theater piece at LaMama, directed by Virlana Tkacz’s Yara Arts Group. (December 3-5, 1993).

Excerpt