Ben Berman

“Ben Berman’s fine, clever poems are never merely clever.  Their frisky formal play is finally and importantly about the finding of forms that might adequately contain our feelings.  As his title, Figuring in the Figure, suggests, Berman is fond of double meanings; indeed, he is in love with all the twists and turns of language, as well as all the structures that display the pleasures of thinking. If invention is his inclination, order is his learned yet sly companion, “a partner,” he writes, “the type/that coyly invites chaos to dance.”  —Lawrence Raab

“Ben Berman’s nimble terza rima is the perfect vehicle for the poems of Figuring in the Figure.  Both expansive and structured, the interwoven stanzas allow him to form and reform probing questions of identity without ever forsaking a deep musicality.  There are tremendous powers of observation on display here.  We watch the speaker ponder mouse droppings, hit the wall in a marathon, describe the great molasses flood of 1919, diaper a doll in a birthing class, then try to manage his “tiny fascist” of a toddler who wouldn’t stop until “every bookshelf toppled like a failed coup.”  His observations are enriched with various kinds of humor–aphorisms, riddles, word plays, and puns.  This book is wise and wonderful.” —Beth Ann Fennelly

“Because design, alone, doesn’t hold weight,/” Ben Berman writes in his remarkable second collection of poems, “we need concrete material—the image/of a bridge over the sound of water.” In Figuring in the Figure, Berman explores the nature of form in its deepest most complex sense, how it sustains and protects us, how it allows us a kind of freedom within its restraints, but how “even stable/ structures that are well designed and built/ with integrity are susceptible/ to fractures.” His luminous details evoke a world of mutable forms and shapes that suggest the fragility of our lives.  In poem after poem, he demonstrates his mastery of Terza rima, moving in, out and around the form with his playful diction and subtle music. The book culminates with a moving, realistic yet lyrical sequence of poems about the birth of his daughter. This is a quietly beautiful book that deserves attention and recognition.” —Jeff Friedman

“Figuring in the Figure is a self-portrait of a man becoming a father. Ben Berman writes inside a modified terza rima that makes a virtue out of clarity and discernment.  The influence here of Frost is hardly fashionable, but certainly sincere and Berman returns us to Frost’s virtues: these poems make points and have a point of view.  Like Frost, Berman is unsparing in his introspection. His book expands his proposition that “inward and onward/might one day merge into the same word”, through a process of figuring “things in” rather “than out”.  He offers us an ongoing philosophy: when faced with the pain and contradiction of everyday life, “to delay judgment and contemplate…incompatible thoughts.” —Rodger Kamenetz

“Berman writes, “I want to live on the verge / of my ideas–all my beliefs set / in stone, stones waiting to be turned over.” This fine collection demonstrates the coiled potential that exists when one occupies that state, engaged in life and language as a unified process of discovery.” —Literary Mama

“Ben Berman’s Figuring in the Figure offers a window into his personal life. In reading the poems, we learn that Berman is a young father and that he is a wizard at word play, among other things.”—Compulsive Reader

“Stand your ground and make thoughtful observations—carefully, and with aplomb. Ben Berman repeatedly delivers on this not-so-easy dictum.” —Foreword Reviews

“The poems in Figuring in the Figure remind us to beware of our tendency toward thinking that, as Alicia Ostriker observed, because we have a name for it, we think we know what we are talking about. When we arrive at the final sequence, IX, we arrive at a new center, wholly anticipated but wildly unimaginable. The poems in Figuring in the Figure give us both the joy of language-play and the miraculous quotidian.” —Ragazine