Fiction. Poetry. In A SWIFT PASSAGE, Barbara Henning celebrates the ongoing life force and transformation as we seek freedom, clarity, confusion and confinement, and everything in between. The pace of life moves us so quickly and with such an urgency to get somewhere in particular and then we circle around and return to where we started, but it's never exactly the same. Henning's stories and poems blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, prose and poetry. The narrator, and her characters, try to tell the truth and then examine how that truth then tells them. Ultimately, narrator and...

"Reading Barbara Henning's poems is always completely refreshing. Perhaps it has to do with that "swerve" between the bumpy pavement under the bicycle wheel and the ring of radiation around the Earth, from the political to the completely mundane. I get caught up in the poem's movement. So deft, so seemingly easy, with an almost folk-art clarity in the weaving, these poems nonetheless make things really weird-I don't get it -and suddenly I'm in the world, "to be here right now"-how did I get here?"- Matvei Yankelvich