MARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York city, often lives and writes now in Paris. Her newest poetry collection, Before The Drought, is from Glass Lyre Press, (September 2017.)  (In an early version, it was finalist for the National Poetry Series.) Berdeshevsky is author as well of  Between Soul & Stone, and But a Passage in Wilderness, (Sheep Meadow Press.) Her book of illustrated stories, Beautiful Soon Enough,  received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for Fiction Collective Two (University of Alabama Press.) Other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, a portfolio of her poems in the Aeolian Harp Anthology #1 (Glass Lyre Press,) the & Now Anthology of the Best of Innovative Writing, numerous Pushcart prize nominations. Her works appear in the American journals: Poetry International, New Letters, Kenyon Review, Plume, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, among many others. In Europe her works have been seen in The Poetry Review (UK) The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, & Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire. A multi-genre hybrid of poems, Square Black Key, waits at the gate. She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, or somewhere new in the world. Her “Letters from Paris” may be found in Poetry International, here:  http://pionline.wordpress.com/category/letters-from-paris/

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"There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations.  Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of But a Passage in Wilderness, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world 'barbaric, vast and wild' that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be."—Jerome Rothenberg

"[This first book] is an extraordinary mixture of emotional power and beauty. It's not like anything else I have read lately or in the past. So MUCH verbal beauty, out of the here-and-now, woven with an extraordinary openness to what is precisely NOT beautiful in human life, making that an intrinsic part of the poem's texture . . . at once quintessential poems of witness and poems with the eternal quality of the tale or fable: a truth co-existent with the truth of observation, intrinsic to the words and the perceptive, humane imagination that engendered them . . ."—Marilyn Hacker

"What makes But a Passage in Wilderness a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. 'Mother-ground,' she says, 'show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.' She has taken her store of our language to heart."—Marie Ponsot