It Is Still Beautiful to Hear the Heart Beat

“Margo Berdeshevsky’s It Is Still Beautiful To Hear The Heart Beat seems to leap up and declare a rhythmic homage to the world, and one is called to gaze into one’s own eyes and see patterns of the past and future — life and death. And when the speaker says, ‘It was one single arrow of passion, and Eros was good with it’ a unique voice pierces us.”** Yusef Komunyakaa, Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize ** “If the beautiful is what delights us, and the sublime is what leaves us awestruck and wanting to kneel, Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetry is both beautiful and sublime. From the naked hunger of the heart to the cosmic force of ‘that world none can see —’ this poetry rises and rises, falls and rises, on a magnificent music that challenges death, defies our human cruelty, and is faithful.' **Alicia Ostriker, Chancellor Academy of American Poets, NY State Poet Laureate ** “Margo Berdeshevsky, trained as an actress, took a primal influence from Shakespeare’s diction and presents poems of innermost reflection as speeches, soliloquys, spot-lit. The subject here is the world now in its various but one crisis, particularly as a space of war. The witness, perceiver, speaker has come to have the guise or part of an old woman — crone. I repeat, this is now, the harrowing recent ‘real’ world, but it is often stripped of reference. By not having context except that of one’s own experience, the reader may float in the language and its melodies. Presented as gift, after all.” **Alice Notley, Recipient of the Griffin Prize, the Ruth Lilley Poetry Prize ** “The magic of this book is that in a time of global suffering, its author ‘walked to the edge of an old and used up world and hummed a tune of invention.’ Brava!” Dante Micheaux author of “Circus,” winner of The Four Quartets Prize from The Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation “A poet of radiant grace, Margo Berdeshevsky moves effortlessly across a vast range of associations in the world of ghosts, birds, hunger, words, and elements. These are poems of magnificent sensuality, full of strangeness, soulfulness, and healing.” **Valzhyna Mort, Recipient of the Griffin Prize ** “This is an incredibly beautiful and sentient book. Margo Berdeshevsky’s poetic rhythms are agile and incantatory, her imagery compelling, and her concerns consistently cogent, womanly, and universal.” **Cyrus Cassells, Poet Laureate of Texas and recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize **