Margo Berdeshevsky
Margo Berdeshevsky, born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her latest collection, Before The Drought (a finalist for the National Poetry Series), is from Glass Lyre Press. It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Kneel Said the Night (a hybrid book in half-notes) is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. Berdeshevsky is author as well of Between Soul & Stone and But a Passage in Wilderness (Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough, received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press). Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her works appear in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, and Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, among many others. In Europe and the UK her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, and Under the Radar. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, at literary festivals, and/or somewhere new in the world. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International Online.
Beautiful Soon Enough
Margo Berdeshevsky is a mature poet and world citizen … writing with emotional power … woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life. So much verbal beauty, with the eternal quality of the tale or fable.
Beautiful Soon Enough
Margo Berdeshevsky
2009
Quality Paper
ISBN 978-1-57366-149-2
EBook
ISBN 978-1-57366-812-5
Winner of FC2’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives — worldly, sexual, obsessive — of twenty-three arresting women.
These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women of a “certain age,” as the French might say, and women with naked hearts, of any age.
Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
Margo Berdeshevsky understands the diabolical complexity of the human heart, and how eros is a form of intelligence as well as a drive. Writing with lyric accuracy and necessary forgiveness about the turmoils of love, she also declares the eighth Deadly Sin: the refusal of intense experience.
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a thrillingly cutting-edge work of photos and short short stories flowing together into an extended erotic dream that limns the inner lives of women deeply yearning for connection and authenticity. This is a splendid book by a fine poet turning into an equally fine fiction writer.
With the publication of But a Passage in Wilderness, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world “barbaric, vast and wild” that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be.