Winner 2019 STA 100 Award
(Society of Typographic Arts)
Each year, the Society of Typographic Arts “seeks to award the best 100 examples of innovative typography from around the world.”

Winner 2019 Design Incubation Scholarship: Creative Work Award
Design Incubation’s Creative Work Award (given to one or two recipients a year) “demonstrates originality, scope, rigor, impact on communication design’s theoretical, critical, historical and/or visionary foundations.”

Winner 2020 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Gold Medal Award in Poetry
“Recognizing Excellence in Independent Publishing,” the IPPY Awards honor the best books from independent publishers, small presses and university presses throughout North America and the English-speaking world.

Winner 2020 Indigo Design Award, Book Design
The Indigo Awards “reward outstanding and groundbreaking design from around the world.”

Winner 2020 Indigo Design Award, Mixed Media/Moving Image
The Indigo Awards “reward outstanding and groundbreaking design from around the world.”

Winner 2020 American Bookfest Awards, Poetry
The American Bookfest Awards “recognize the best books in mainstream and independent publishing throughout the United States.”

Winner 2020 MUSE Creative Platinum Award, Book/Publication Design
The MUSE Creative Awards “is an international award that honors creative professionals whose work transcends time, inspires, breaks boundaries, ushers the present to the future.”

Finalist 2020 International Book Award Poetry

Finalist 2020 Communication Arts Motion Graphics

Dennis J Bernstein is a renowned muckraking journalist, host and producer of “Flashpoints,” a daily investigative news program syndicated on dozens of public and community radio stations; a contributor to publications such as The Nation, Spin Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times; and a winner of many awards and honors, most recently the 2015 Pillar Award in Broadcast Journalism. He balances his frontline reporting with a regimen of daily writing and ongoing publication of poetry.

Bernstein and Lehrer began working on a book of poems, originally titled Stretch Marks, in 1979. Instead of completing that book, Dennis and Warren leapt into writing their first play together (Social Security: The Basic Training of Eugene Soloman), and over the intervening years they collaborated on three books, French Fries, GRRRHHHH, and Special Ed. A few years ago they began collaborating again on short poems. Dennis’ writing. Warren’s visualizations. Now, on the 40th anniversary of their original effort, they have completed the book of poems. Comprised of 225 poems (including a dozen or so from the original effort), Five Oceans in a Teaspoon reflects Bernstein’s life experiences and the artistry of Bernstein and Lehrer at the height of their creative powers.

Many of the poems in this collection have appeared in magazines and publications including Red River Review, New York Quarterly, The Progressive, Your Daily Poem (YDP), The Rag, The Texas Observer, Goodman Project, J Journal, Shot Glass Journal, The Harbinger, Age of Jahiliyah, The Poetry Super Highway (PSH), The Chimaera, OEN: OpEdNews.com, Annapurna Magazine/Clarify Yearly Journal, Pemmican, Edison Literary Review, Bat City Review, Writing Raw, Dissident Voice, ZYZZYVA.

Praise for Five Oceans in a Teaspoon

“Brilliant and beautiful. I love it! Thank you for bringing in the new.”
Alice Walker Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of The Color Purple

“Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, the new collaboration between poet Dennis J. Bernstein and artist Warren Lehrer is an engaging masterwork of poetic visualization that has only a handful of precedents in literary and design history… If Philip Roth’s classic coming-of-age novel Portnoy’s Complaint had been designed in the style of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, the result might be something like Five Oceans in a Teaspoon... This virtuosic collaboration has the tonal and experiential range of a memoir, but rendered in artfully designed poem-texts. The glimpses into American life across more than half a century are always personal, a background of current events within the alternating minutiae and milestones of existence. Small, well-observed moments accumulate: whole decades come and go as we glimpse a life lived in snapshots taken over many years. Each piece in this funny, poignant work is scored—almost in the musical sense—with graphic organization for performance on the page. The intersection of visual and verbal articulation, sustained across the entire span of almost 300 pages never flags or becomes repetitive. The designs Lehrer created for Bernstein’s succinct poems … turn the short lines and statements into vectors of force in fields of action. The effect is remarkable and the range of graphic innovation is impressive: Lehrer gets inside Bernstein’s writing, exploring the ways its structures can be amplified, its meanings extended, through graphical means. Bernstein fits many oceans into the well-defined parameters of Lehrer’s teaspoons; this is a true collaboration, and neither artist would or could have made this work without the other. The complement of their now fully mature talents is evident throughout, and the publisher has taken real care with the design of the physical object so that it opens well and feels as good in the hand as it does in the eye, mind, and heart.”
Los Angeles Review of Books Johanna Drucker foremost visual literature scholar

“From a kidnap note for a world held hostage by an A-bomb, to a Holocaust survivor’s tattooed arms where the numbers just don’t add up, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope. Here the concrete poem is cracked wide open. How can the imagination free the fetters of the page? It’s a math problem where the answer is ‘Divorce.’ It’s a typewriter keyboard that spells out a poem instead of QWERTY. Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.”
Bob Holman poet, poetry activist and chronicler, founder: Bowery Poetry Club

“Bernstein and Lehrer—the Lennon and McCartney of viz-lit—have reunited at the height of their creative powers. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon speaks to the madness, vulnerability, aspiration and language of our time. The gutsiness and raw emotion of the writing, revelatory appeal of the visual compositions, and brevity of the form creates an intensely moving experiential journey.”
Steven Heller author of over 180 books on art, design and visual culture, co-chair SVA MFA Design

“A collection of poems by Dennis J Bernstein, brought to life, visually, by Warren Lehrer—Five Oceans in a Teaspoon is a perfect book! In many ways it feels as though Five Oceans is the sum total of [Lehrer’s] numerous approaches that [he] developed over the years. A beautiful title, some of the poems put the reader to work in interesting ways… The animations are quite wonderful and serve as their own performances of the poems.”
Design Matters Debbie Millman

“Published in 1984, Bernstein and Lehrer’s book/play French Fries is considered a classic in visual literature; it won the AIGA Book Award, a TDC award, and was claimed to be “one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read” by Philip Meggs in AIGA Journal. Steven Heller says it’s a book he covets to this day in his forward to Bernstein and Lehrer’s new book, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, from Paper Crown Press. Bernstein, a poet and investigative journalist, writes of his life: growing up dyslexic, his father’s gambling addiction, his experience teaching in prison and living on the street; of love, loss, and caring for aging parents. Lehrer, a designer, author, and co-founder of Ear/Say studio is known for his expressive typography and visual storytelling, and gives each poem a visual composition. The result is a kind of concrete poetry formed through collaboration, and a truly moving reading experience. We’re running some spreads above, but believe us when we say you’ll want to read them in book form.”
AIGA Eye on Design Meg Miller

“Five Oceans in a Teaspoon is an ode to visual poetry. The book is the result of a longtime collaboration between investigative journalist and poet Dennis J Bernstein and designer and author Warren Lehrer, featuring type-based poems that span everything from Alzheimer’s to war and peace. Curated by Lehrer from Bernstein’s thousands of poems, the 200-plus poems have been artfully arranged into typographic compositions that bring home the emotional and metaphorical impact of their words.”
Creative Review Aimée McLaughlin

“The 1984 book French Fries by Dennis Bernstein and Warren Lehrer is a landmark work of visual literature. In the years since, Bernstein’s poetry has continued to win acclaim and Lehrer has set the bar for designers and book artists in visual literature. The duo’s new book, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, is a masterful contribution to the genre they’ve helped shape. It is a multi-modal project including animations, exhibitions and performances. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon is an autobiography in poems. Bernstein has reported on wars, taught in prisons, hosted a radio show and survived open heart surgery. As he reflects on his life, he reminds the reader that the very struggles which leave us feeling confused and alienated are part of our shared human condition. Lehrer is able to interpret the text so successfully because he approaches the poems as a writer as well as a designer. His instinct for wordplay destabilizes and extends Bernstein’s concise writing—drawing out double meanings, alternative interpretations—providing an unconventional reading experience. Turning the page is like listening to a perfect jazz solo, inevitable, but unpredictable. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon is a moving testament to Bernstein’s view of the world, and the experiences that have shaped it. Once again, Bernstein and Lehrer show the potential of visual literature as a mature field. Beyond self-reference and inter-art discourse, the interplay of text and image (and text-as-image) packs a powerful intellectual and emotional punch.”
Artists’ Book Reviews Levi Sherman

“This book of poems exploits every formal aspect of typography, at a fevered pitch, to establish its syntactic relevance to the semantic, and to ensure—uncannily—that readers are invited and able to navigate unexpected orientations of text, changes in spacing, positioning of word or phrase beginning or ending points. Lehrer also indicates graphical elements—dots, lines, shapes created by interstices between text—and uses punctuation as images when it suits the content of Bernstein’s poetry. For the most part, letters and words do the heavy lifting all by themselves in this work that expands the notion of concrete poetry extending back some four hundred years.”
Timothy Samara Making and Breaking the Grid (Rockport)

“Last week, the Center for Book Arts in New York City debuted an exhibition that truly takes poetry off the page… Lehrer and Bernstein’s multimedia project Five Oceans in a Teaspoon takes the visualization of literature to a whole new level… making words loop, twist, and stretch both on the page and the screen.”
Fine Books & Collections Rebecca Rego Brooks

“Dennis J Bernstein and Warren Lehrer have had successful collaborations in the past, best known for their extraordinary book French Fries. Most recently, they are the creators of Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, which similarly sits at an intersection of forms—poetry, visual text, and performance. The subjects cover much of a life, beginning with childhood and ending with death, in particular, that of the writer’s mother and father. They also include poems about other lives, people the writer has connected with—including, but not limited to, people in prison, the front lines of war, poverty, street violence. The visualizations are a tour de force, but, more important, they enact the poems themselves, revealing their poignance and complex humanity… Thrust into a time-based private performance, we become as conscious of the act of reading as we were when we first learned how to read. Perhaps that in itself adds to our sense of discovery and pleasure when we finish any one of the poems from this collection. The very act of conscious reading enacts what is essential to each poem’s emotional and metaphoric center… making Bernstein and Lehrer’s Five Oceans in a Teaspoon a rather remarkable introduction to poetry itself.”
CBAA Book Art Theory Blog Susan Viguers

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Earlier Praise for Dennis Bernstein

“Here is all the pain and grace of parents, of prisons, and of perception. And it is all done in such an artful plain style that one wonders how so much meaning can be embodied in so small a place. Dennis Bernstein’s work is intuitive and keen and deep, in the wonderful and loving and fearless tradition of Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen and Muriel Rukeyser.”
William Packard, the late poet, editor publisher of Design Quarterly

“Dennis Bernstein’s short poems are polished jewels.”
Nina Serrano, Josephine Miles/PEN Oakland Awardee, Open Book, Poet to Poet radio host

“Dennis Bernstein is a hero to me because of his dedicated, unflinching reporting of real news on Flashpoints, at KPFA in Berkeley, California. But his fearless pursuit of the truth about what is happening in our rapidly transforming world did not prepare me for the beauty, depth, not-one-word-mislaid perception of this amazing book. Each word, each line, each thought has a weight, a texture, a surprise all its own. With its moving preface, in which Dennis shares his own struggles as a young child with special needs, Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom is that unusual gift literature can be: We are connected to humanity in ways we might never have even considered or imagined before. Above all it is art turned to us through the eyes of love.”
Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of The Color Purple

“Come into the special ed classroom, where the kids who don’t fit in anywhere else spend their day. For these kids—real kids Dennis J. Bernstein taught in the New York City public schools before he became an internationally known investigative journalist—pistols, switchblades, police cars and hunger are more instructive than textbooks. Special Edis about daily life under the siege of poverty, racism, and class warfare. We come to know these kids intimately: Gloria, whose mother was disappeared in Guatemala and whose friendship with Marilyn rescues her from trauma-induced silence; Paulie, who “finds tears in the mirror’s eyes” but thinks of himself as tough and defies the gang-guys who threaten to drop him from the roof of the projects; Regina, who sells nickel bags before class and gets high alone in the gym before giving a heart-wrenching performance of a poem by Langston Hughes. Dennis Bernstein loves these kids fiercely, and we come to love them too as the collection unfolds. In these stunning, understated poems, these poems unafraid to name the darkest facts of our world and yet continually informed with compassion, we find ourselves in Rilke’s world of beauty and terror. To depict with love, as Bernstein does, is indeed to transform, the way a shattered guitar and broken glass are transformed by the kids in the special ed classroom into art and jewels.”
Anita Barrows, PhD, poet, child psychologist, translator (with Joanna Macy) of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be warned: this is not the pretty poetry that makes you smile knowingly at the talent of even the most impoverished lives made quaint. It’s rather the gift to the reader of sad, tragic, even brutal information. It’s the jolt to the body as some of the words land viscerally in the gut. And at other moments, it’s the dreamy reverie of a child, a teacher, or the reader that cradles a torn to bits but still beating human life — a possibility in rhythms that will no doubt want to be reread and become remembered… Their humanity brings us to the door of the harshest and saddest emotions, and the awareness that there was then as there is now, poverty and crime and lack of caring in the too often divisive United States of America. The poems are small, and they are small but packed stories… This is the stuff that could haunt those of us ready to hear…”
Carol Smaldino The Huffington Post

“Wow. I’ve just read/finished Special Ed, and I’ve got chills. Truly. I’m reminded of a phrase, I think from Yeats, re: The Easter Rising, and the resultant repression by the Brits, “…a terrible beauty is born…” Beautiful. Terrible. Wonderful. Delight dances with dread, dig me? I read more than your poems, D.B. (Dennis Brutus?); when I read/hear/see the malevolence aimed at teachers today by the political whores of corporate charter – pimps, I think of your Mrs. Edwards – brilliant, insightful, sensitive – and – aware opened. In several of your pieces, you say “My kids” (var.) but I hear/read: “we kids,” for they are you – essentially – and couldn’t be more if y’all shared DNA markers. They are you separated by the veil of time. You/we are all “slow,” “retarded,” “pea-brains” in a vast, slashing, slicing machine called school, which destroys over ½ its victims.”
Mumia Abu-Jamal, award-winning journalist and (former deathrow) prisoner