ORACLES FOR NIGHT-BLOOMING ECCENTRICS

“Right out of the headlines, participant in, on and of the edges of the dangerous and ‘bejeweled’ world, listener of sages ubiquitous, public radio opinionated, cable tv hysterical, spinning on the deck of the luxury liner of night itself with an ‘Excedrin habit’ and a penchant for small dogs and oracular insomnia, this is Nancy Berg’s poetry, seeking its soulmate inside an emerald and unlike anything else being written, ‘crackling like early electricity,’ heavy with art. When will this walking full-production Hollywood musical of a poet come to your town and make you a deal deep inside, ‘tangling all arteries’ with her abundant literary grace and charm? You can only hope and dream. But she is here now in this booty-kicking little number. So, pick it up, try it on. It looks great on you.”
— Rustin Larson, author of Crazy Star and Islands

“If Kafka is accurate in his assertion that a book should serve as an ax for the frozen sea within us, and I believe he is, then Nancy Berg’s poems accomplish this exact task by a gentler, and nurturing alchemy. Oracles for Night-Blooming Eccentrics holds us to its breast, rocking us, whispering its lullabies of disappoint, hope, and creation, urging us to warm. I came to it chilled by the world and was thawed by the heat of its plangent and triumphant honesty. Such is the power of Berg’s truly fi ne poems.”
—Mark Spragg, author of An Unfi nished Life, The Fruit of Stone, and Where Rivers Change Direction

“You don’t have to be eccentric—night-blooming or otherwise—to savor Nancy Berg’s enchanting vision. It helps, though, to want to see as eccentrics see, with unfi ltered eyes and deconditioned minds and hearts as open as canyons to sublime, mysterious delights dressed up as ordinary. This is poetry as revelation.”
— Phil Goldberg, author of This is Next Year, Roadsigns and The Intuitive Edge

“Not easy, one would imagine, to write a volume on the intersection between longing, being in the moment, metaphysics, and love as a unifying theory of consciousness. Perhaps more difficult to do so with such sensitivity and wry humor. Nancy’s done more than that in her poems, beautifully centered in such humanity, weaving entire stories into single poems that also display life lessons. . . Her poems are beautiful, mesmerizing, and instructive — they communicate so much about passion for life and beauty, for living with longing for the eternity of the moment and for fi nding that moment with clarity, insight, passion, and joy, that I feel more alive having read them. Can’t think of a better place to begin to practice some conscious living and detachment than by reading Nancy Berg’s Oracles for Night-Blooming Eccentrics.”
— Steven D’Ambrose, Writers’ Guild of America

“Upon first reading, Nancy Berg’s poetry affected me greatly. Upon repeated readings over the following months, it mapped out a different way of thinking about the world that is generous without limit and deep beyond measure. And upon reading Berg’s manuscript so many times that it has become a dog-eared, overly-post-it-noted mess on my bookshelf, it has become clear to me that it is the very best book that I have read throughout my forties, with images that come to mind almost daily and a point of view that suffuses my life, giving me a way to live the ideals I deeply believe in.”
—David Groves, Executive Director of Freedom to Read, L.A., Past President of American Society of Journalists and Authors, Los Angeles

“This stuff is good. Poetry for the 21st Century. Honest. Poignant. Filled with hope, desire, wit, charm, and beauty. To read Nancy Berg is to come face to face, eyeball to eyeball with the contemporary human condition. . . yet find yourself wanting more. To read Nancy Berg is to be filled with awe and sometimes even envy. I feel like this! I laugh and cry like this! Why can’t I write like this? To read Nancy Berg is to discover a soulmate who, in singing what it’s like to be herself, embraces what it’s like to be you. And me. All of us. All the way.”
— Larry Brody, award-winning writer/producer, Director of Cloud Creek Institute for the Arts

“Oracles for Night Blooming Eccentrics are poems of a generous spirit. Nancy Berg is a master of characterization, with poems inhabited by journeys to the miraculous, painful, and gritty places where the soul lives. Her poems ‘burn a hole in your palm’ or make love on islands ripped by a hurricane. Always edgy and beatific, ‘perching in dangerous places like a sparrow on a high voltage wire,’ they speak the language of dolphins. They sing in the language of the soul.”
— Diane Frank, author of Entering the Word Temple and Blackberries in the Dream House

“Real poets praise life. Not that they don’t see the darkness and feel the pain. But they know it’s part of an all-embracing Whole in which, as Nancy Berg tells us, “everything above and below the unclouded sky/feels surprisingly worthy of love.” In her unique and authentic voice, Berg invites us to share that vision. This is delicious poetry, fi lled with memorable lines, aha insights, laughter, tears, and, yes, beauty. Like all significant art, it gets better each time you return to it.”
— Jack Forem, co-author of What the Bleep Do We Know!? and Awakening the Leader Within

“Nancy Berg, a visionary poet excavating the depths of human experience, has created a shattering and hilarious chronicle of our planet and our time.”
— Dan Carbone, Playwright, Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award-winner

“Nancy Berg’s poems do such complete justice to the craziness of the world, and to the author’s own, that I have to believe every small and delicate affirmation. . . . More than that, I can’t help smiling with delight that all this rich craziness IS. And even more than that, these poems make me want to be as crazy as I am. . . Thus, it is clear, these poems have the power to inspire at least temporary enlightenment—and to make one realize just how dangerous that is.”
— Silvine Farnell, Ph.D., Host, Voices of Silence radio program, creator of “Deeper Into Poetry” workshops

“ . . . My favorite artists make me laugh and cry. Charlie Chaplin all at once. So does Nancy Berg . . . Nancy’s poems overwhelm me with an experience that cannot be refuted: ‘Life is worth living.’ ”
—Michael Berry, Playwright, humorist, author of The Drummer’s Bible