Although the poems in this fifth book by Jacqueline Berger grapple with such subjects as sex, sorrow, and shame, there are also celebrations of delight and joy. Together they provide abundant insights about the past and present, as well as intriguing considerations of the future, "a ride that arrives // before we are ready to leave." With powerful emotional concision, she explores, unabashedly, what it means to live. Left at the Ruin is an exceptional collection.

-Andrea Hollander, And Now, Nowhere But Here

These poems, these words, they are quiet fires every one. Palpable feeling comes out of these lines, rendering an intimacy melancholy but celebratory too in their constant acts of self-discovery. These poems are in immediate conversation with the reader, speaking-never shouting-their startling news of the everyday uncovered, or recovered, in stunning moments of feeling: "the sheer joy of being a body, / keeping it up all night." The poems live true to their insights, traversing some imaginary line: "Give desire a boundary / and it sails across." Those words speak for the book, but they come with a quiet kind of sadness as well: "All of my ages swarm / against the mismatch of time." We may know that sensibility ourselves intellectually, but in these poems we are made to truly feel it.

-Alberto Rios, Not Go Away Is My Name

Jacqueline Berger's Left at the Ruin is a book full of candid appraisals and examinations of sex and sexuality-its limits, joys, and secrets-viewed and described with refreshing frankness and clarity. Berger describes the ways sexual experience can be the vehicle for psychic change and growth, just as it can be the confusing realm in which pain or violence resides. This is a book that understands poetic power lies in ambiguity and not in moral certainty, and shows us the unique power of poetic language to help us understand ourselves.

-Mark Wunderlich, God of Nothingness