Exit Pursued by a Bear and Others (Paperback or Softback)

"Exit Pursued by a Bear is original and delightful, a remarkable debut."
- Daisy Fried, author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again

"A Dairy Queen converted into a funeral parlor, a famous stage direction from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, the sands of Afghanistan ... everything is grist for Ginny Beards' clever mill. Full of humor, learning, and dark insight, she wears her erudition lightly, as all the best poets do."
- Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down

In the poems of Virginia Beards, insomnia is a 3-ring circus, a Dairy Queen mutates into a funeral parlor, an 18th century graffito enlivens a bedpost in a Venetian palazzo, a swim in the Nile both lulls and terrifies. What she sees both directly and via a sideways glance, the inanities of the overheard as well as of the zeitgeist, and the stresses of domestic relationships are some of her themes in Exit Pursued by a Bear. Whatever the focus, she is committed to the pleasures of language and to multum in parvo, much in a small space.

Virginia Beards draws from an archive of urban (New York, Philadelphia), suburban (Seattle), rural (Lancaster county, PA), and international experience (Denmark, France, North Africa) plus a considerable literary backlog acquired as a member of the Penn State English Department for twenty-three years. She has published criticism in The Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth Century Views of Women Writers, and in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction. Her poetry has appeared in Writing on the Edge (Univ. of California, Davis) and her short stories in Chester County Fiction. She holds a M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.