Impulse Toward Flight

About the Book

      Her sixth book of poetry, Impulse Toward Flight, reflects the skill of a mature poet at the top of her form. The poems in this collection blend self, family, history and community, forming an intimate autobiography. Her poems reveal how people both shape, and are shaped, by place and history. In many of these poems, Unger lays to rest past losses – people, places and things that are no more. She invokes the landscape of the years preceding the Second World War in a small, ethnic enclave of New York City as well as the urban home front of the war years in the borough of The Bronx, New York. Her perspective encompasses the world of Minidoka, a Japanese-American internment camp located in Hunt, Idaho, where her husband Ted and his entire family were interned during that era.

     Unger’s poems are often intensely female and deal with experiences common to all women. These include marriage, work, parenting, growing older and the dance and struggle between men and women. A widely-published poet, Unger’s poems have appeared in such distinguished journals as New York Quarterly, George Washington Review, The Nation, Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal and many others. They have been widely anthologized in books by New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Milkweed Editions. “Letter to the Co-Eds” won a John Williams Narrative Poetry Award.  “The Audition” won an H.G. Roberts Award.  The poems in  this collection display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft.  

About the Author

       Impulse Toward Flight  is Barbara Unger’s eighth published book.  She is the author of five books of poetry, a short story collection and an award-winning non-fiction book.  Her work was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Observer,  Choice: Current Reviews for Colleges, and others. A Professor of English  at The State University of New York at Rockland for over twenty-five years, Unger has  published steadily for the past four decades..  

      Her poetry books include: Basement: Poems 1959-61(Isthmus Press: San Francisco, CA, 1975); The Man Who Burned Money  (The Bellevue Press: Binghamton, NY, 1980); Inside The Wind (Linwood Publishers:  Stone Mountain, GA, 1986); Learning to Foxtrot (The Bellevue Press: Binghamton, NY, l989) and Blue Depression Glass, in Troika One (Thorntree Press: Winnetka, IL, l990). Unger’s short story collection is Dying For Uncle Ray and Other Stories (Kendall-Hunt Publishers: Dubuque, IA, l990).   In 2000, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ  published BRONX ACCENT: A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough,  co-authored with Lloyd Ultan. It won the New York Society Library Book Award for Borough History, the Hermalyn Award for New York Urban History, and the J.M. Kaplan Award.  A soft cover edition was published  in 2006 by Rivergate Books, an imprint of Rutgers University Press.

         Individual poems have appeared in  The Nation, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, The Massachusetts Review, Kansas Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, Minnesota Review, Confrontation and others.  Her short fiction has appeared in Midstream, Reconstructionist, American Fiction,  Beloit Fiction Journal  and others.   

       A New York State Council on the Arts award-winner, she won grants and residencies  from The State University of New York, The National Endowment for the Arts,  The Millay Colony,  Djerassi Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers.  Unger was twice-nominated for The Pushcart Prize.