Esther: A Novel in Verse

A novel-in-verse, Esther is molded with the poet’s tools – among them sound and image, and the belief that the smallest increments of language can provide the grace to withstand, in the name of family, the onslaught of human failings and cruelty.

Pam Bernard, poet, professor, and editor, received her MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and BA from Harvard University. Her awards include a NEA Fellowship and two Mass Cultural Council Fellowships. She has published three full-length collections of poetry, and a verse novel entitled Esther (2015). Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, where she teaches creative writing at Franklin Pierce University, and also conducts private workshops in memoir and poetry.

Family is destiny in Pam Bernard’s brilliantly accomplished verse novel. Westward settlement in the early years of the twentieth century, rendered in lush and startling detail, is yoked to the brokenness at the core of Esther’s family. In verse as finely attuned to the measure of the line as it is to layers of meaning, Bernard makes manifest a time, a place, and a woman, and sheds new light on the darkness that gets handed down from one generation to the next. Esther is a wrenching and exhilarating experience: no reader will remain unchanged.
— Jennifer Barber, author of Given Away, Kore Press

In the early 1900s, traveling from Kansas to California, across prairie and plains, desert and mountains, Esther’s journey is an odyssey of the spirit, a journey toward self-knowledge and survival. In this brilliant novel in verse, Pam Bernard perfectly blends poetic language, imagination, and research to create a work of stunning achievement, where each character is drawn spare and sharp, each event becomes metaphor. Yet the landscape is perhaps the strongest character of all – save, Esther herself, whose strength in the face of abuse, grief, and loneliness will leave an indelible mark on your own spirit.
— Patricia Fargnoli, author of Winter, Hobblebush Books

April 2015
204 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$18
ISBN 978-1-933880-48-8