Witness (The Birdy Poetry Prize)

The poems in Ruth Bardon’s Witness are deceptively simple; they’re short and clear, and most focus on small episodes of daily life, starting with childhood and continuing into old age. The complexity comes from the ways in which the poems are infused with later knowledge, with understanding and compassion, and with a persistent awareness of the fragility and brevity of our lives.

2024 Finalist—Birdy Poetry Prize, by Meadowlark Press

If specificity is indeed universal, then Ruth Bardon’s Witness is a debut poetry collection for us all. Imbued with the rich details of life, these tightly crafted yet generous poems enlarge our days with vision and grace. “I think of how strong I was,” Bardon writes, “slicing through a world / where I couldn’t even breathe, / and claiming it as mine.” These are works of wonder and precision, and whether turning a keen eye toward a solar eclipse, a truck packed with caged chickens, strange new technologies, or her own indelible past, Bardon’s poems implore us to pay attention, to bear witness to the horrors and wild joys of existence.
—Jared Harél, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject

There’s a passion just below the surface of Ruth Bardon’s poems that sometimes rips its way out, as it does in the last lines of “Near the End”: “I just wanted to make my voice / into something jagged and sharp / and to slash somebody with it.” We’re not told exactly what’s going on in this hospital scene, but we sense the extreme emotion of the speaker. The same thing happens at the end of “Typography,” in which the good girl in nursery school misbehaves because after earning only green or yellow lights, she “wanted to know how red would feel.” But, in “Typography,” and in Bardon’s poetry in general, we’re more likely to find emotion expressed “by taking the time / to find the perfect word,” whether the poem is centered on the significant events of family life and stories of birth and death or on stories of hurricanes, floods, and Halley’s Comet. Dividing her poems into three sections—Early Years, Middle Years, Later Years—Bardon is “claiming [life] as mine,” and she claims it for us too, as witnesses.
—Brian Daldorph, Kansas Poems and Words Is a Powerful Thing

Witness explores the ways in which the stories that make up families continue to be written in the margins of our personal stories. Bardon’s intuition for narrative is guided by a poetic sensibility that uses images and lyricism to recreate memories and experiences. While time acts as the framework of Witness, its poems speak to the present moment in perceptive ways.Nuanced and inviting, Witness teaches us to see.
—José Angel Araguz, Rotura and Ruin & Want

In Witness, Ruth Bardon’s use of precise spare language and perfect metaphors captures and penetrates the essence of each subject like the stabbing of a squirming bug. It is a monument to modern life, full of understated emotion, excellent and fine. Thank you, Ruth, for giving the world this collection.
—Ruth Maus, Valentine and Puzzled

Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks: Demon Barber (Main Street Rag, 2020) and What You Wish For (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She is also the author of Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells (Ohio University Press, 1997).