Barbara Helfgott Hyett is a cofounder of the Writer's Room of Boston and is currently the director of POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets. She has taught at Boston University, MIT, and Harvard University. The author of four collections of poetry including The Tracks We Leave, Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, and The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus, she has worked as a visiting poet in schools all over Massachusetts. Her programs with students, teachers, and families include reading and writing workshops in childhood memory, parenting, and watchfulness.

Books by Barbara Helfgott Hyett: Rift, The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, Natural Law, In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

Other poems on the web by Barbara Helfgott Hyett:
"In the Ring of Twenty Signs"
"Memo From Antarctica"

Barbara Helfgott Hyett's Home Page.

About Rift:

"Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s poems reflect both her anguish and her fervor; their warmth elevates the reader to spiritual heights."
—Elie Wiesel

"Helfgott Hyett’s poems about love, infidelity and the body in all its guises are tough, tender, and juicy."
—Maxine Kumin

"Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s Rift is a book born of acute psychic necessity and there is not a trifle or bauble in it. . . . Faced with the annihilation of the life she has known, Helfgott Hyett employs her imagination, her learning, and her poetic virtuosity to search among biblical and mythic narratives, arctic expeditions, memories, meteor showers, classical and romantic art, and history for a way forward. This book is that way, a profound gift to all of us. The title sequence is itself a major work, a rich, polyvocal, unflinching vision of the world we live in now."
—Richard Hoffman

"Helfgott Hyett takes up the theme of loss, specifically the break-up of a long marriage, in poems that are direct and detailed, with a power rooted in restraint and compression. Her imagery is clear and often surprising, as in these opening lines: ‘He rises slowly, so as/ not to wake her. An ox is/ that careful as it tears the grasses . . . ’ She captures each moment with precision, her ear for dialogue unerring, as in these lines: ‘She lay her face on his thighs./ . . . He patted her hair/ . . . Poor you, he told the top of her head./His boat shoes were tapping/the cabinet. It was all/he could do not to run.’ These poems, wrung from grief, anger, and disillusionment, return again and again to an affirmation of the hard work of living."
—Ellen Bass