Diary: Poems reflects the world, with personal experience written in the margins and the story of our moment filling the space of the prose poems. From war to global warming to homelessness to the difficulties experiencing safety and connection under such conditions, these situations lead to moments of attention to the state of the world, written with "you" or "we" speakers to emphasize the collective nature of our experience, and highlight the universal, broken into moments of observation or imagined scenes. Sometimes the personal breaks
through, always with the traditional "I," whose experience is minimized by the weight of the larger situation.
Since the poems pay great attention to the moment - to presence - they are laden with visual and imagistic content: from a mother and child sitting in the rubble of Gaza to a couple in Ukraine disappearing into the woods to escape harm to an immigrant family crossing our border and sharing imaginary nourishment, we encounter portraits of our current state of affairs. Also appearing are works of commentary and many poems examining the thin veil between life and death: can it be crossed by imaginative effort?
The world as cauldron is burning with stories and reasons to speak. Diary: Poems exists as a document of what is seen and said. As such, it enlarges on the traditional sense of the genre, traditionally self-absorbed and narrow, and offers a contemporary version of what it means to live and write at the boundary of peril to the whole, how one small voice can partake in the mood of our time and account for what it observes, as all significant narrative opens rather than limits possibility. Diary: Poems is an awakening of language, inviting the reader to take responsibility for a world shaped by our difficult and challenging times. Chernoff 's poems keep our minds open and our eyes on what is truly necessary
About the Author :
Maxine Chernoff is the author of more than 20 poetry collections and 6works of fiction including a NYT Notable Book of 1993, Signs of Devotion.With Paul Hoover she won the 2009 PEN International Translation Awardfor their work on Friedrich Hoelderlin as well as a 2013 NEA Fellowshipin Poetry. An emeritus professor of Creative Writing at SFSU, she served aschair from 1997-2016. She has also taught at Exeter University in England(2013), the Prague Summer Program for Writers (2010), and for the SummerLiterary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia (2001). In 2016 she was a visitingwriter at the American Academy in Rome. She has read her work internationallyin England, Scotland, Belgium, Russia, the Czech Republic, China, and Brazil. Former co-editor of New American Writing, she has lived in the Bay Area since 1994. Whilestill a Chicago resident, she won the Carl Sandburg Award, The Chicago Sun-Times Fiction Award, and5 Illinois Arts Council Fellowships. She was a frequent reviewer of fiction for the New York Times, theChicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Her two previous books, Under the Music: Collected ProsePoems and Light and Clay: Selected Poems are available from MadHat Press, which will bring out a bookof essays about her work, A Jar of Air, in 2026.
Review :
Praise for Maxine Chernoff
I never read a book of poems "start to finish" without looking up, but this one I did. Chernoff has definitely opened the cupboard and let out the ghosts! The way it can take decades for personal and/or historical trauma to take center stage not as an explosion but as a slow ripening and gathering of multiple domestic and public facts; ones here that within the Diary become organized, riveting and fall hauntingly into place. The work reminds me of 1963 in Paris when I first saw Hiroshima Mon Amour and the way it took the lid off things and where I had to viscerally acknowledge what happened with the bomb in Japan was us. Turning the raw into the formal real! -Stephen Vincent
[F]or contemporary prose poets of my generation, especially women, Maxine Chernoff is the most important figure. She was writing prose poetry before it was cool, and her two books, A Vegetable Emergency (1976) and Utopia TV Store (1979), were the main influences for any woman prose poet born between 1949 and 1960. -Peter Johnson
Maxine Chernoff is known for her brilliant explorations of a single form, the prose poem. Chernoff, also a writer of fiction, is a marvelous storyteller with impeccable comedic timing. . .
Brief as these poems are, there is a vastness to the project. By acquiescing to the modest confines of this form, Chernoff discovers a seemingly endless reservoir of curiosity, invention, and delight. -Elaine Equi
Maxine Chernoff has written and published prose poems for over forty years, reinventing the form into a space where the agile, speculative mind holds sway. Words and the things they clutch at, verbal gesturings, implicit characters, all reckoned with in a remarkably clear, direct prose that leaves, as the best of play always does, their magics in place. -Michael Anania
It's time to acknowledge that Maxine Chernoff is a national treasure. Who has a voice like hers, able to penetrate into the roots of life's pain, and awkwardness, and sometimes beauty? -Peter Orner
The great themes of love and grief pulse through the intimate meditations of Maxine Chernoff's work. Figures-a she, a you-thread across landscapes of thought and perception, objects near and far, bringing each of us closer to what it means to be here. -Ann Lauterbach
