The Face I Never Saw: Poetry

By Bettina Rotenberg

Bettina Rotenberg's stunning rhapsody pieces together fragments of a stifled language. It assembles ambiguous memories of a lost love, twisted stories of an ancient home, a sanctuary. The task is one of reunion. As the work proceeds, it ressembles a pilgrimge, or a quest for asylum, or a ritual of patient devotion. The path is hard: deceitful signs abound, as well as false redeemers and terrible asylums. Sometimes delusions can hardly be distinguished from a prophet's or a poet's visions. All the while, however, a transfigured world is coming together--and the capacity to begin perceiving it, too, as it pieces itself together, over and over, in myriad mobile configurations. Among Bettina Rotenberg's many voices--inspired, sardonic, sorrowful--there is a beautifully forthright one, greeting the future. - By Ann Smock

"Let me trust your words coming upon me.." In The Face I Never Saw, poet Bettina Rotenberg sees the inner face that speaks the unspeakable mysteries of 'life and death' with an accurate sympathy and echoing love that is seldom heard with such clarity and grace. - By Sarah Menefee

Bettina Rotenberg grew up in Toronto, attended Radcliffe College, studied painting for three years, and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, Berkeley. She taught art, literature, and creative writing at colleges in the Bay Area, and between 1995 and 2015 was the founding Director of VALA (Visual Arts/Language Arts). She sent visual and performing artists into public schools in the East Bay to work with poets to teach low income minority children poetry in conjunction with the arts. She wrote a book about her work, I Dare to Stop the Wind, which was published in 2010.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1951214455
• ISBN13: 9781951214456
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: Adelaide Books
• Length: 104 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"