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Although the poems in this fifth book by Jacqueline Berger grapple with such subjects as sex, sorrow, and shame, there are also celebrations of delight and joy. Together they provide abundant insights about the past and present, as well as intriguing considerations of the future, "a ride that arrives // before we are ready to leave." With powerful emotional concision, she explores, unabashedly, what it means to live. Left at the Ruin is an exceptional collection.
-Andrea Hollander
About the author
Jacqueline Berger is the author of four previous books of poetry, including The Day You Miss Your Exit (Broadstone Books, 2018); The Gift That Arrives Broken (Autumn House Press, 2010), winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn (University of Utah Press, 2005), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry; and The Mythologies of Danger (Bluestem Press, 1997), winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize). Several of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac. She is a professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and has recently relocated from San Francisco to the California Central Coast with her husband.
