Cities and Memory

Poetry. Barbara Henning’s new book brings together several years of her atonal musings on autobiography, place and longing. Lyrical bursts punctuate the narrator’s otherwise seamless restlessness–Detroit, New York, Tucson, and India. The following Escheresque lines from one of Henning’s narrators could well have been spoken by Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane: ‘Why am I here, I think, when I could be there? Because if I were there, I’d be thinking why am I here when I could be there.’ As lopsided as a grin on the edge of a nervous grimace (‘sex is an ever available age old temporary cure for sadness’), CITIES AND MEMORY is a disjunctive incarnation of a simple, profound ethos: ‘Don’t forget me, he said.’ And Henning doesn’t –Tyrone Williams.