Cities and Memory

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"