Auction: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

Quan Barry

$18.00

Publication Date: September 26th, 2023

Publisher:

University of Pittsburgh Press

ISBN:

9780822967170

Pages:

Bear Pond Books of Montpelier

1 on hand, as of Apr 24 4:46pm

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Description

Poems about the Freedom That Arises When We Finally Let Go

In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how and why we construct a self in order to navigate the world.

About the Author

Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Barry is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including the novel When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East. She is one of a select group of writers to receive National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction. In 2021 her novel We Ride Upon Sticks was awarded the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Barry’s first play production, The Mytilenean Debate, premiered in spring 2022. She is currently Forward Theater’s first ever writer-in-residence.

Praise for Auction: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

“She takes the crap of existence head-on, and makes art despite it.”

—Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

Praise for Loose Strife:

“Barry risks the lurid, and the knowing, but comes out more like a prophet, overwhelmed—sometimes sublimely so—by the first- and second-hand truths she must convey.” —Publishers Weekly starred review

Praise for Loose Strife:
“Barry offers a difficult, sophisticated look at violence in personal, historical, and textual forms.” —Booklist

Praise for Loose Strife:

“An intriguing aesthetic choice in this book is Barry’s use of the self-referential. . . . Some of this initially comes across as unnecessary exposition, but turns out to be a declaration of a calling to follow a most disquieting muse, a sustained exploration of a moment of despair expressed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: ‘Where will it end? / Where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hate, this Fury?’ Loose Strife, which ultimately stitches together the dark history of humanity into a single volume of verse, is Barry’s most compelling response yet to that question: hate doesn’t end, hate doesn’t stop.” —Los Angeles Review of Books