Selected Press
Jen Bervin’s work has been covered in national and international publications and media outlets such as NPR, The Nation, Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Hyperallergic, and The New Yorker.
- Poetry in the Expanded Field
- John Yau, Hyperallergic
- "An unclassifiable artist and a deep reader, Jen Bervin has expanded the notion of what it is to be a poet in the 21st century."
- Ecopoetic Antinomies: Inscription and Voice in Jen Bervin's Silk Poems
- Jayme Collins, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
- "Both expansive in its knowledge of literary and silk history and intimately enmeshed within the demands of its body... the silkworm–speaker enacts and transcribes the material history and conditions of its existence"
- Silk Poetics (on Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems and Aditi Machado’s Emporium and The End)
- Toby Altman, The Georgia Review
- "Silk Poems presents a banquet of innovative forms. But these forms are not an extension of the poem’s content. They are adaptations, imitations, translations of silk itself—its genetic structure, the loops of its strands, its beta-weave. What if form is not an extension of content, but rather an extension of the material world—of the acts of cultivation and labor that produce what we wear, write upon, and use to swaddle our dead?"
- Jen Bervin: Catharine Clark Gallery
- Dan Beachy-Quick, ARTFORUM
- "How does one create and not create at once? How does one do and undo in the same gesture? It seems to me Bervin is trying to envision such an art. And to Emily Dickinson’s question “Unto the Whole—how add?” the artist has a quietly astonishing answer. Don’t. Magnify what is already there so that we may learn to see more decently."
- Critics' Pick: Jen Bervin at Des Moines Art Center
- Jessica Baran, ARTFORUM
- "A maker attuned to wonder, Bervin produces fastidious and often collaboratively made artifacts that resist scholarly conclusiveness for the purpose of illuminating the process of understanding."
- Jen Bervin: Silk Poems
- David Naimon, Between the Covers Podcast
- “Jen Bervin’s work—all of it—engages the eye, the hand, the ear, and the mind. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence, by curiosity, forbearance, and vision. She knows the unexpected wonder of pattern is everywhere and that the smallest detail contains enough energy to spawn a universe. I think they should send her into space, if it were not for the fact her work has already sent us there. Her poems in themselves, those exhilarated fragments, are the purest form of the art itself—they contain the innate inner gradients of whatever takes our breath away.” -Mary Ruefle