Welcoming Carol Berg

As we announced last month, Carol Berg will be joining the editorial team for Heron Tree Five. Carol’s poem “The Ornithologist Searches For A Shared Ancestry” (read it here!) was the first poem published by Heron Tree, and we are delighted that she will be with us in the coming year.

Carol works as a writing tutor at Pine Manor College. She received her MFA from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. Her poems are forthcoming or in DMQ Review, Kentucky Review, The Journal, Spillway, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Radar Poetry, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Her Vena Amoris is available from Red Bird Chapbooks and her chapbooks Ophelia Unraveling and The Ornithologist Poems are available from dancing girl press. Another chapbook, The Johnson Girls, is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She was a winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She lives in Groton, Massachusetts, and sporadically blogs at carolbergpoetry.blogspot.com.

To give readers a sense of Carol’s aesthetic, we asked her to choose a few poems from the Heron Tree archives which caught her eye. Here’s what she found and what she says:

“To a Hymn Book” by Jeff Hardin: “I love how Jeff Hardin’s poem is so intimate in regards to an inanimate object. The opening lines pull me immediately into the poem.”

“Falconry” by Ash Bowen: “Ash Bowen’s imaginings of a falcon is empathy at its finest.  The phrase and I kill a sky / of young starlings is so stunning.”

“In ‘Science of Speech’ Aaron J. Styza plays with how misunderstanding words can create vivid images in the mind.”

“Maggie Blake Bailey’s poem ‘Matins for the Poet, Joshua Poteat’ is beautiful in its resistance to depression and sadness. Her words dance.”

“Sara Fetherolf’s ‘Girl Lost on the Prairie’ is stunning in its use of language to show loss and confusion. The poem is a real gift of imagination.”

“Jennifer Gravley’s controlled use of repetition works wonderfully in her poem ‘Knotted as Twins.’”

We hope you’ll take some time to visit or revisit these poems at Heron Tree. And we encourage you to follow these links to Carol’s own work published elsewhere online:

“Punishing the Johnson Girls” at Pith
“Diverting Flight” at DMQ Review
“Love Poem to My Therapist” at The Tishman Review
“Girls Who Struggle” at Rogue Agent
“After The Ornithologist Beholds Plate 9 Ruby-Throated Hummingbird, Archilochus Colubris, Writes a Love Poem To James John Audubon” at Vinyl Poetry