Barbara Rockmanis the author of Sting and Nest: Poems, winner of the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award. She teaches writing at Santa Fe Community College and at Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. Raised in western Massachusetts, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Books by Barbara Rockman:

Other poems on the web by Barbara Rockman:
Two poems
Two poems
Two poems
"The Mangle"

About to cleave:

"To cleave, meaning both to cut and to cling, contains its opposites economically, and so within Barbara Rockman's luminous collection we find ourselves standing within the familiar fallen world: living to die, loving from a solitude we both long for and long to escape from. These are poems that cast a spell, an incantation, a divination, in language rich enough to eat, that calls out from the soul and returns us to our senses."
—Marie Howe

"In this hungry collection, a poem turns one way to reveal a glitter of shards, then another and the world is whole again, faceted back into brilliance. The poems give us a highly breakable world—one that can be entered, ruined, healed, and, ultimately, known."
—Jennifer Boyden

"Masterful poems of connection and estrangement explore the commodious quality of the natural world to reflect, heal, resist, and endure the unending struggle of human life. Yet for all its seriousness, what depth of play with language, sound, and line! A simply glorious collection."
—Janet Fitch

"Barbara Rockman holds memory and lets it fray into a new music, thrilling in its breakage. In these vivid poems thought is not distant and abstract but embedded in relationships, in things, or, more precisely perhaps, the body is permeated by landscape, the land filling our senses and the self, letting go of what would keep it outside and separate."
—Betsy Sholl

"In this eclectic collection of poems, Barbara Rockman searches for the extraordinary—even mythic moments—one finds in the most ordinary life. 'Teach me the thousand ways to see,' she asks the 'Goddess of blinding snow and / black ice,' because, for Rockman, attention seems akin to prayer, a way to 'settle into what opposition might teach.'"
—Grace Bauer