Loves Fingerprints: Poems

Love's Fingerprints investigates the deep imprints made on us by those we love, living and remembered: mother and father, wife/lover, children and grandchildren, ancestors known only through stories passed down, homes long lost and homes holding us today, and two nations-the United States and Israel. Family life intersects with the larger world, with an undercurrent of the Book of Job. Love's Fingerprints emerges in the ear as a jubilant song of persistent memory that entrancingly recalls a profoundly realized life made rich by the promontories of family and abundant love. Humane and exuberant, his is the kind of intellect that rushes over the past like water over pebbles, elevating ordinary moments to the realm of art with a luminosity that startles. Such wondrous clarity of language and sound are owed to feats of wisdom but also a loyalty to one's revelations. - Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man and Roll Deep Bernard Horn's poems shine with honesty and reverberate with history. There's so much in these pages: the shy love between fathers and sons, the miracle of a stranger's intervention, the fearsome strength of memory. Love's Fingerprintsholds a mirror to all our human fragility and beauty. - Rachel Kadish, The Weight of Ink, Tolstoy Lied, and From a Sealed Room Love's Fingerprints makes its strange and original music from the duet of past and present.... Emerson said that when he was educating himself in his youth, two great parties were in contention, "the party of hope and the party of memory. " The poems in Love's Fingerprints belong to both parties, braiding them together in moving dialogue. - Carl Dennis, author of Practical Gods (2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)