April Bernard

Psalms

Moving easily between high and low diction, evoking at once the language of the King James Bible and the sharp psalms of Bertolt Brecht, these lyrics offer a spirituality rooted in the daunting pressures of late-twentieth-century life-living in cities, disease, war, sexual love, friendship, and, always, wandering. Carrying forward an age-old argument about the existence of God and the paradox of human suffering, they test the barriers to faith in ourselves and in our connections with others, and they explore how doubt can accommodate belief.

"April Bernard's voice is a voice of one crying in the wilderness, but the wilderness is our populated, all too familiar one and her psalms are striped with modern despair, loving, and knowing." —John Ashbery