Metropolitan Tang: Poems

Whether she is examining the breakup of her marriage or watching bulls in a field, considering Derrida’s concepts of “presence”; or her hairdresser’s less theoretical philosophy, Bamber is all eyes and ears. Her poems turn over the incoming data, making meaning out of random juxtapositions, sense out of chaos, or, if nothing else, a good joke out of a bad situation. Bamber’s voice, both sensitive and wry, is uniquely hers and eminently likeable.

Praise & Reviews

The interplay between sophisticated irony and candid emotional vulnerability gives Linda Bamber’s poetry its characteristic and charming truthfulness. Bamber never pretends not to know she’s writing a poem, but at the same time she often gives the feeling that she’s talking with us over a glass of wine. I love the many surprises presented by her work.
–Mark Halliday

At this moment there is a lot of hopped-up, associative/dissociated poetry being written, full of experimental and idiosyncratic vigor; I don’t fault that work. But I ask you how much of it has the experiential gravitas found in Linda Bamber’s work– which is fun besides?
–Tony Hoagland

Conversational brio, a feel for the times, a willingness to follow her own misdirections, a raconteur’s send of timing . . . a major achievement.
— Ron Slate

Linda Bamber’s poems offer the deepest of pleasures. Often funny, and alert to the intricacies and surprising, eruptive energy of colloquial speech, this work deftly mixes the quotidian with the historical, literary, religious and philosophical.
— Laurie Sheck