Barbara Henning’s new book brings together several years of her atonal musings on autobiography, place and longing. Lyrical bursts punctuate the narrator’s otherwise seamless restlessness–Detroit, New York, Tucson, and India. The following Escheresque lines from one of Henning’s narrators could well have been spoken by Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane: ‘Why am I here, I think, when I could be there? Because if I were there, I’d be thinking why am I here when I could be there.’ As lopsided as a grin on the edge of a nervous grimace (‘sex is an ever available age old temporary cure for sadness’), Cities and Memory is a disjunctive incarnation of a simple, profound ethos: ‘Don’t forget me, he said.’ And Henning doesn’t” "You are alive and then you're not, and that's it," writes poet and Zen teacher Norman Fischer in a talk on Chan master Zhaozhou. "It's so easy to forget that this is the case." Or a little more stringently: "You and I are already dead. We think we'll be dead later, but that's baloney. Actually, right now in each breath we are alive and we are dead. We don't know that and that's why we are suffering." Barbara Henning's radiant Cities and Memory doesn't have to insist on this, or get all histrionic about it; such a sense of scale and occasion permeates everything here, the correlative lightly-worn gravitas and grandeur inhabiting even the most inconspicuous occurrence. So Cities and Memory gives us everything back, our lives in their ordinary everyday luminosity, nothing special. "Hey yoga girl!" --Tenney Nathanson Barbara Henning attended Wayne State University before moving to New York City with her two children in 1983. She has also lived in Tucson, Arizona, and in Tesuque, New Mexico. As a longtime yoga practitioner, she has lived and studied in Mysore, India, with Shankaranarayana Jois. She was the editor of the poetry and art journal Long News: In the Short Century from 1991 to 1994. Henning has taught at Naropa University, the University of Arizona, and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is professor emerita.