I am looking to raise funds for the printing costs for a small poetry chapbook in an edition of 200.

The Book and What It Means to Me:

My name is Robin Bernat and I have been writing poems since I was a child. Beginning in 1997, I have self-published three previous volumes, waiting: eleven poems of love and anticipation (1997), blue: twenty love poems and a song of despair (1999), and Sentimental: poems and short stories (2007). Those editions have been carried at a few local bookstores in Atlanta including the Emory University bookstore, and also several museum shops around the country. They are also for sale at Whitespace gallery and Poem 88.

Saudade is a collection of love poems some in sonnet form, others in quatrains. The title of the volume is a Portuguese word meaning a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. Many of the poems touch on classical themes: love and loss, memory and anticipation. Influenced primarily by the  confessional poets, the poems draw on my own life experiences of requited and unrequited love, the sudden death of my partner in December 2000, and how that conjured memories of my father’s death in 1979. On a lighter note, there are poems written for my two cats and happier poems written for my husband, Jon. 

My work, written and visual, was once aptly described by a colleague [where ideas of classical beauty co-mingle with their dark cousins].

Saudade combines poetry with lush, arresting images to create something of a cross-breed between the traditional chapbook and an artist book.  The books are small enough to fit in a coat pocket for easy contemplation.

Biography:

Robin Bernat is foremost an artist and writer and secondarily the owner and curator of Poem 88 gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited locally, regionally and nationally and has been collected by many important institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kemper Museum of Art, The High Musuem of Art, MOCA-GA and The Weatherspoon Museum. Working primarily in film and video, Bernat's work explores the fleeting and the provisional. 

Besides her self-published volumes, she has published monographs under the imprimatur of Circle B Press for artists Rick Berman and Susan Seydel Cofer and published a collection of images, Pictures Take You Places (2014) by Phillip March Jones under the imprimatur Poem 88 EDITIONS. She has also been a contributor to Art Papers Magazine and Burnaway.

Through Poem 88, Bernat brings to the fore the work of significant and emerging artists in Atlanta and the Southeast many of whom were former classmates. She is a graduate of The University of Georgia and The Atlanta College of Art; in 2001, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Where I am with the book:

All of the poems have been written and the book has been designed by me with assistance from my husband. All that is left is to raise the $1450 to digitally print and bind the book. I am hoping to complete production on the book so they are ready for Valentine’s Day, 2016. Every year, we host a Valentine’s Day Salon at my art gallery, Poem 88, and I would very much like to have the book available for that occasion.

Here is a sample poem:

Several storms later and everything 
smells of loam and rotting wood. But 
there is beauty, too, in this city: varying 
shades of emerald adorn it. Each summer 
the wet tumult topples trees -- giant poplars 
lay over the road and Mrs. L’s shady 
playground is now completely exposed.
Sun-fearing bushes have been uprooted to 
be moved to another part of the garden.  It’s 
not so different for you and me, really.  The 
atmosphere shifts and we can see more 
clearly that what we hoped was deep 
affection is shallow-rooted after all. When 
I removed the limbs and vines, love had fled.

Here's another sample page spread:

REWARDS!!

$25 earns a copy of the book!

$50 earns a copy of the book + a poem written on the topic of your choice

$100 earns a copy of the book + a poem written on the topic of your choice + a digital color print in the style of the book, or previous books.