Monica Berlin is the author of Elsewhere, That Small (Parlor Press, 2020); Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open (SIU Press, 2018); No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaboration with Beth Marzoni, and winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize (Parlor Press, 2015); and the chapbooks From Maybe to Region, Your Small Towns of Adult Sorrow & Melancholy, and with Marzoni, Dear So & So

Other poems by Monica Berlin in Verse Daily:
August 14 2015:   "Against arranged line & proportion, in defiance of" (with Beth Marzoni) "scale, favoring curve & bend, we'd give..."
January 16, 2012:   "Dear So-and-So" "Down the hall the accordion man turns into a door..."

Books by Monica Berlin:

Other poems on the web by Monica Berlin:
Two poems
Five poems
"[Where, these days, after that turning back, a still]"
"WSome Days Landlocked Doesn't Mean Water"
Four poems
"[So, the day will become a small boat]"

Monica Berlin's Website.

About Elsewhere, That Small:

"Sit and stay a while in the strangely familiar rooms and landscapes that Monica Berlin's Elsewhere, That Small constructs for us. Let Berlin stop the clock, just for a few seconds, so we can take stock of 'the ordinary seen & seen / -through' of our day: a doorframe warped by humidity or an over-pruned tree. Here, we weather cycles of loss and recovery; here, we dwell in the contrary senses of belonging and longing to be elsewhere. Berlin's beautifully structured and incisive poems ask us to face—and to marvel at—the brute force of the world's ongoingness. More so, Elsewhere, That Small offers a lesson on how to region here—that is, how to accept, how to endure—as Berlin writes, 'Maybe / the only way to understand emptiness / wholly: to live in it.'"
—Emily Rosko

"The contingency in Elsewhere, That Small is embodied by the sonnet form, its propensity to turn from abstract to concrete, map to memory 'heavy-shaded by green.' It's in the rhythm of Monica Berlin's language, in iambs that sometimes strike in a clear pattern sturdy as a chair back before shifting 'like some trick of maybe.' And yet: what is contingent in the form is inescapable in the fact of our being human. In these poems, we occupy spaces, patches of ground and perspectives that we may be so bold as to call our own. What a gift to be reminded of the view from where we're standing, and how fleeting it is when the time comes to turn: 'So I'll give / it up again, say instead yours.'"
—Beth McDermott

"This sequence of poems makes me consider the solitary expanse of the sonnet, how the span of fourteen lines opens up a zone through which a thought can travel nimbly its avenues. Intimate, contemplative, seeking out the smallest folds of language, Berlin's verse leads us through estrangements and dismantlings, whose phrases disclose their 'beautiful, hardness, their sharp edges & / sharper heave of near-careless care.' This book makes palpable a certain kind of nearness, an almost, an about-to-rise, like orchestral instruments tuning up. Reader, bring your listening."
—Carolina Ebeid