A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea

  Bergman's masterful narrative, told in lyric pieces, of the transportation, installation, and metaphorical presence of the Statue of Liberty, serves not only as a paean to the work of her transporters but as a meditation on the arrival of the Lady Liberty in a land whose history she can hardly hope to accommodate. Tactile, descriptive, and wise, these poems recover part of our history while delivering us to a still uncertain present.
—West End Press

A leap at any chance to read Denise Bergman's poetry. With her usual (unusual) imagination and political insight, we follow the Statue of Liberty from its conception in France to its reassembly in the United States. Bergman's lyrical language both humanizes and deconstructs her, and we are drawn by the multilayered poems into a liaison with a symbol and a work of art that we will now always see differently.
—Jean Hardisty
Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College

A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea is a collection of poems about one of the most iconic sculptures in the U.S. Bergman's poems assemble the pieces of the Statue of Liberty as she begins her journey from idea to Bedloe's Island. As the sculptor/poet creates each piece and reassembles the statue, the poems come together with economy of language and striking images that bears witness to a broader and newer story of the U.S.
—Laura Tohe
Arizona State University



A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea was the 2014 winner of West End Press's Patricia Clark Smith Poetry Prize.


The Sculptor and His Mother
She Crosses Borders
Waiting
On the Island She Is Born
Everyone's in the Act

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Listen to the poet read from A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea

Interview on Mass Poetry's website

Review in Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices