About the Poet

Carole Bernstein has published three poetry collections: Buried Alive: A To-Do List (Hanging Loose Press, 2019); Familiar (Hanging Loose Press)—which renowned poet J. D. McClatchy called “an exhilarating book”—and And Stepped Away from the Circle (chapbook, Sow’s Ear Press), winner of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook contest.

Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Apiary, Bridges, Chelsea, The F-Word, Hanging Loose, The Ledge, Light, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been included in four anthologies: American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Unsettling America (Viking), The Laurel Hill Poetry Anthology (Laurel Hill Press), and The Philomathean Society Anthology of Poetry in Honor of Daniel Hoffman (Philomathean Society). She won an Honorable Mention in the 1993 Allen Ginsberg Awards.

Bernstein lives in Philadelphia and works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant. She holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Seminars and a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.

Published Works

Buried Alive: A To-Do List (Hanging Loose Press, 2019)

*A Small Press Distribution Recommended Title

“Carole Bernstein’s gorgeous poems are unsentimental, witty, acerbically and hilariously skeptical of nature, of sex, religion, product placement, virtue-signaling—and of herself. She takes a stand for the fierce, exasperating messiness of life against abusive ideals of perfection. Preemptively mourning everything she loves, holding off death by any and all means, tending to deep griefs in secret, her compassion masquerades as a silent rebuke to the naïve, the uninformed, the as-yet unbereaved, about their own embarrassing, dangerous hopes. This wonderful book stokes in me a furnace of purifying rage against all the molesting assholes against the new Nazis and the old ones, and against onrushing darkness in all its forms. I will follow this ferocious, reluctantly tender voice anywhere.”
—Patrick Donnelly, Frost Place Poetry Seminar Director, author of Little-Known Operas

“From satirizing the mechanics of the American workplace to discovering motherly devotion in the myth of Persephone, Carole Bernstein’s third poetry collection Buried Alive: A To-Do List takes readers through caves and coffins alike, showing what living things still kick inside the previously presumed-dead.”
—Claire Oleson, Cleaver Magazine

“Finely rendered details are things buried alive in the living and breathing, vibrant poems of Carole Bernstein, where we encounter family portraits; teenage memories (cutting school, loving Rusty Staub)… the frank vicissitudes of pregnancy; the tiny sorrows of parenting; and always, always, a rare view of what Bernstein calls “domestic interiors” in lyric phrasings sometimes as warm as a cat in bed, sometimes as lost as a neglected fuzzy pink unicorn.”
—Al Filreis, Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania

“Carole Bernstein’s book, Buried Alive: A To-Do List is full of edgy humor, a sardonic tongue-in-cheek tone, mingled with the ability to tell the truth about even the most uncomfortable memories and tell it straight. I love the wild energy of this book and the poet’s willingness to take chances. I love the sense that the poet’s unique and tensile use of language creates an unforgettable book.”
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award Winner

Familiar (Hanging Loose Press, 1997)

“Carole Bernstein’s poems are raw—as a wound is, or a flower. They are also canny and compelling. Familiar is an exhilarating book, quickened by blood-bright longings and a restless intelligence. It’s a book bursting with life, and with the art that has transfigured that life into poems the shape of a reader’s own heart.”
—J. D. McClatchy

“Narrative momentum, intensity of feeling, accuracy of observation, and impassioned honesty mark these poems. Carole Bernstein’s Familiar is a memorable first book.”
—Daniel Hoffman

“The bittersweet poems in this first collection by a gifted young poet confront domestic pain and loss with an unblinking eye and an ear quick to conjure the ‘handy spell/[that] imprisons the odd shapes of the unforeseen.’ At their unsparing best, the poems in Carole Bernstein’s Familiar are anything but.”
—Charles Martin

And Stepped Away from the Circle (Chapbook, Sow’s Ear Press, 1995)

*Winner of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition.