"Opinions are not literature" Gertrude Stein famously admonished Ernest Hemingway. It's a maxim that puts most art critics behind the Eight-Ball. Not Bill Berkson. His criticism doesn't just deliver an opinion, it embodies an experience, matching the texture and plasticity of visual forms with a vividness and suppleness of language that gives the reader something shapely and immediate to respond to thereby opening path ways in the mind to the image or object being evoked and judged. His subject is art; his essays and critical prose poems are uncommonly graceful literary artifacts. —Robert Storr Born in New York, Bill Berkson is a poet, art critic, and teacher. Formerly a professor of liberal arts at the San Francisco Art Institute, he lives in San Francisco and New York.