The Shape of the Keyhole

The Shape of the Keyhole

By Denise Bergman

Released November 16, 2020

In 1650, in Massachusetts, a woman was falsely accused of killing her friend's child. She was immediately tried and, within days, hanged. The Shape of the Keyhole examines a community's fear-driven silence and envisions the innocent woman's emotions as she awaits her execution.

Denise Bergman’s most recent book is The Shape of the Keyhole, Black Lawrence Press, 2020. Three Hands None was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2019. A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea was published by West End Press in 2014. The book won the West End Press Patricia Clark Smith Poetry Prize. The Telling, a book-length poem, was published in 2013 by Červená Barva Press. Her book Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller's teacher (Cedar Hill Books), was translated into Braille and into a Talking Book. She was the editor of City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry (West End Press), and author of Keyhole Poems, a sequence that combines the history of specific urban places with the present. An excerpt from her poem "Red," about the effects of a slaughterhouse on a neighborhood, is permanently installed in a park in Cambridge, Massachusetts.