Things I Don’t Want To Talk About, Poems by Carolyn Hill-Bjerke

The poems of Things I Don’t Want To Talk About by Carolyn Hill-Bjerke are charged with energy, yet also step back into quiet contemplation behind the bustling exterior. The tension of these poems is provocative, and powerful.

Sample Poems by Carolyn Hill-Bjerke

“Carolyn Hill-Bjerke makes a golden debut with Things I Don’t Want to Talk About. Splendidly matter-of-fact and earthily spiritual, her vatic voice whirls through streets and through time. This poet seems to speak from a 7th sense: both wise and wiseass, earnest and ironic, childlike but maternal—cut loose, but rooted in a family and a city. About death she is deadpan, and so shockingly blasé we know we can believe her every word. Whether Hill-Bjerke is discovering adoption papers, devastated by a miscarriage, or overcome by an epiphany at a supermarket checkout, her poems create keyholes to a universe where eras and people and art connect. She is our lens to experience, rushing down Third Avenue or delayed in an elevator, fearlessly chatting to Proust, Hemingway, Freud—and God. Sure-footed, yet utterly vulnerable, Carolyn Hill-Bjerke is always a New Yorker, tender and brash.” —Molly Peacock

“Carolyn writes with her whole heart in that rare emotional space that is both urgent and filled with reflection and precision. These are sharp, powerhouse poems that will thrill longtime poetry enthusiasts as well as invite new readers to the form.” —Stacy Bierlein

“A long-term celebrant and reader of Dante, Carolyn takes us on a journey through some of her own personal hell with deeply evocative poems that capture much of the alienation present in our modern society. Her works are jewel-like metaphors that speak to the indifference, the cruelty, and the devastation that many people can easily relate to, living between individual dehumanization and the potential for terror-based annihilation. Her poems are harmonious expressions of universal disharmony.” — Scott C. Schwartz, M.D.

“Reading these poems was a challenge reluctantly accepted. Carolyn gently returned me to my own memories of abandonment, terror and unfathomable sorrow, but then, brought me back feeling healed and stronger. It is an opportunity no one who has lived fully should avoid.” — Dr. Mary F. Belmont, Colonel, US Army Nurse Corps, Retired

Carolyn Hill-Bjerke works as an agent in the film/advertising business in addition to crafting her poems. She attended Syracuse University for her BA and Columbia University for her MFA in writing/poetry. She lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her husband Wayne Braino Bjerke and their three children.

ISBN-13: 978-1625491701, 88 pages, $18

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