Loose Strife. Quan Barry. University of Pittsburgh Press. Pittsburgh, Pa. 2015.
Quan Barry is utterly magic.
Not that smarmy bright light "and for my next trick..." magic. Barry is magical because she instantly transports the reader to a new reality. We recognize where we are at all times when reading Barry but also realize it has never looked quite so real in quite this way.
Whether she is writing about the killing fields of Cambodia or the tunnels of Cu Chi, and we have all heard the horrors, the reader is whisked to a reality previously invisible and unavailable.
Barry pulls off the remarkable feat of being clear like crystal but hard as diamond, hard as nails, and at the same time so gently and lovingly human, it is almost impossible to reconcile the two. Barry does it.
Loose Strife is in this case - the endless battle we all endure in trying to become humane. Quan Barry is quite simply masterful.
Loose Strife
Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate
tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one
leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful
because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review
the critic writes, "Barry seeks not to judge but to understand."
Did she want us to let her be, or does she want
to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill
of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand
died? In the first room with the blown up
black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has
to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain
represented in the photo but because of her calmness.
the tranquility with which she tells us that her father
and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school
a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach
thrown in the face and the question of whether or not
the author could write, "The full moon sat in the window
like a calcified eye, the woman's face aglow with a knowingness."
I felt it come over me and I couldn't stop. I tried to pull myself
together and I couldn't. They were children. An army of child
soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge
picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents
were killed so that they would be left alone in the world
to do the grisly work that precedes paradise.
And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn
in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case
the vise an instrument not of torture
but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures
the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear
and total hopelessness as exists
in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world.
For three $US per person she will guide you through what was
Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree.
Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how
her father and her sister and her brother went among
the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms
of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.
...
Don't need me.
In the Semitic light I mistook
him for the gardener,
something in the look
of his hands. Give me the body,
I cried. I am of his flock.
Believe me.
The email claims I am a lady
who is very much at the top of
her game.
Now if only I lived in
Milwaukee, city of hops.
A reprieve for me.
That a woman's touch would
soil him. The white robe forever
marred. So
much of what he preached I
still don't understand
Sister, how it grieves me.
In my fantasies I imagine a
dark man in a three thousand
dollar suit,
the man a heart surgeon with a
love of poetry. Yeah yeah.
It's beneath me.
When the world ends I will
remember bits & pieces of my
wicked ways. The seven demons
of the head. The sound of our
moans when one of them
pleased me.
& tell the others I am risen
Then he points away from
himself & out into the
stony world, I imagine his heart
beating stay but his face says
leave me.
In that movie with the teen
prostitute, how no one ever
touched her yet
the maniac took up a gun. So
many ways to touch someone.
Naive me.
& what of it? A man nailed like
a bloody flag to two pieces of
wood.
the duality of the word cleave.
I get it now. He was trying
to free me.
I don't know it yet but it's good
advice. I should write it down
somewhere.
Star of the sea & the sea a sea of
bitterness. Lord God,
don't deceive me.
...
Barry does not hesitate to dance into the darkness where others fear to tread. With chops like these she can do whatever she likes and thank you, thank you, thank you.
Reading Quan Barry for the first time makes me think of my younger self, makes me remember the first time I read Michael Ondaatje, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut. I remember those books, where I was at the time, and I know I am going to remember reading Barry forever.
These poems have heart and are heartlessly blunt. These blunt poems have beauty in spite of the bloody wounds they sever open.
Loose Strife
Everyone dreams of being harmed. It's easy. If I were to restructure the narrative,
I would start with the serial killer taking his wife's face in his hands
and nodding sagely toward the raggedy young woman by the diner door,
a baby slung on her hip. "They're the invisible ones," the killer tells his wife
who thirty years later tells the journalist who once lived as a teenage runaway
hopping from rig to rig. I have never had to force myself to stay awake
as the journalist did as she hitched cross-country. I have never had
to adopt extreme behaviors in order to stay alive. But once I needed help
and every single person who drove by pretended they couldn't see me,
ostensibly me a dirty black woman in an oversized coat
standing by the ATM. In the article the journalist details
the night a trucker pulled a knife on her then told her to run
then a different night when a woman's mangled body was found
in a truck-stop dumpster as the cab the journalist was riding in
sat filling up, all over the landscape the young runaways tortured
and killed, pierced with metal, their bodies completely shaved.
So many ways to be invisible, so many ways to be erased.
On the traffic island by the westside Target a man with his cardboard sign
saying any little thing will help. Everyone dreams of being harmed.
Much tougher to recover from the dream of harming...
The other time I went invisible I went invisible for six whole weeks.
It was November. I stood as my hands slowly froze, the whole world passing me by
even as I started crying. After 9/11 a friend joked that a black man
in a UPS uniform and a truck could still go anywhere he pleased.
Tonight if I could go anywhere I would go back to that afternoon
when the last photo of her was taken. She's so young, her body a sapling
her smile goofy and adolescent, self-conscious. She is sitting in the backseat
of a car, this murdered girl, the one he tortured for weeks in the back of his trailer,
stringing her up by a series of hooks before finally garroting her with bailing wire.
In the photo, I imagine she is on her way toward a body of water.
Something that will bear her up. In ancient Greek there is a noun for the blessing
of children. EUTEKVIA. Lord, have mercy on us. She is fourteen years old.
...
These poems have power, magic and grace. Hard to beat those three.
Quan Barry is spectacular, seriously. These poems move us all one step closer to a better understanding of what it is to be human beans.
Reading these poems makes you feel smarter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
BLURBS
“Violence across history, from Greek myth to modern American serial killers and the Cambodian genocide, animates this disturbing and graphically original fourth effort from Barry (Asylum). She utilizes dual-justified and unusually arrayed text to fit stark scenes where we find someone ‘hiding in a space meant/ for buckets and rags as// next door the soldiers/ drag away a young boy,’ or, in a modified ghazal, a witness at Golgotha watching ‘a man nailed like/ a bloody flag to two pieces of/ wood.’ Taking in ecological as well as human horror, falling gingko pods remind Barry of failing satellites, ‘all of which some day will come tumbling back.’ In a series of poems that belong together despite their diverse scenes, she tries ‘to describe the unimaginable/ in a time and a place when sadly everything is imaginable.’ Those vivid pictures, and their self-consciousness about what it means to narrate extremities, perhaps benefit from the book's origin in a collaboration between Barry and visual artist Michael Velliquette. And yet the book stands up, and stands out, on its own. 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.”
and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school
a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach
thrown in the face and the question of whether or not
the author could write, "The full moon sat in the window
like a calcified eye, the woman's face aglow with a knowingness."
I felt it come over me and I couldn't stop. I tried to pull myself
together and I couldn't. They were children. An army of child
soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge
picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents
were killed so that they would be left alone in the world
to do the grisly work that precedes paradise.
And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn
in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case
the vise an instrument not of torture
but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures
the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear
and total hopelessness as exists
in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world.
For three $US per person she will guide you through what was
Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree.
Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how
her father and her sister and her brother went among
the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms
of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.
...
PLEASE NOTE, TBOP was unable to reproduce Quan Barry's poems exactly as they appear in her book. We apologize profusely to both Ms. Barry and to the University of Pittsburgh Press. We here at TBOP will continue to try to improve our technical proficiencies. A thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters.
...
Perhaps a word about style. Today's book of poetry has no clue why Barry has chosen a variety of formal constructs for her poems. These deliberate forms are consistent blocks, columns of text with perfect margins down both sides. I'm sure it means something and I assure you there isn't a comma out of place in these panoramic puzzles. But I don't know what it means and don't really care. Why would I? Loose Strife is a solid as it gets, Quan Barry is a stone cold heavyweight. Period.
How is it possible that one person knows what Quan Barry knows? Who can know this? How is it possible that Quan Barry riffs across the water as though she were the Siren of Time.
Do you get the idea that TBOP likes this absolutely stunning book? Loose Strife compels you to turn the page.
Noli Me Tangere
& I cried out in Aramaic, the
tongue of the only god, Rabbi,
it's me!
Noli me tangere, he whispered,
& the world went black.
Don't cleave to me.
Comfort me with apples is a
mistranslation. What the J-
writer meant:
Sustain me with raisins. Put
down a bedding of apricots.
Sleep with me.
The last time we spoke on the
phone one final moment of
connection.
Take care, he said, but I knew
what he was really saying.Don't need me.
In the Semitic light I mistook
him for the gardener,
something in the look
of his hands. Give me the body,
I cried. I am of his flock.
Believe me.
The email claims I am a lady
who is very much at the top of
her game.
Now if only I lived in
Milwaukee, city of hops.
A reprieve for me.
That a woman's touch would
soil him. The white robe forever
marred. So
much of what he preached I
still don't understand
Sister, how it grieves me.
In my fantasies I imagine a
dark man in a three thousand
dollar suit,
the man a heart surgeon with a
love of poetry. Yeah yeah.
It's beneath me.
When the world ends I will
remember bits & pieces of my
wicked ways. The seven demons
of the head. The sound of our
moans when one of them
pleased me.
& tell the others I am risen
Then he points away from
himself & out into the
stony world, I imagine his heart
beating stay but his face says
leave me.
In that movie with the teen
prostitute, how no one ever
touched her yet
the maniac took up a gun. So
many ways to touch someone.
Naive me.
& what of it? A man nailed like
a bloody flag to two pieces of
wood.
the duality of the word cleave.
I get it now. He was trying
to free me.
I don't know it yet but it's good
advice. I should write it down
somewhere.
Star of the sea & the sea a sea of
bitterness. Lord God,
don't deceive me.
...
Barry does not hesitate to dance into the darkness where others fear to tread. With chops like these she can do whatever she likes and thank you, thank you, thank you.
Reading Quan Barry for the first time makes me think of my younger self, makes me remember the first time I read Michael Ondaatje, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut. I remember those books, where I was at the time, and I know I am going to remember reading Barry forever.
These poems have heart and are heartlessly blunt. These blunt poems have beauty in spite of the bloody wounds they sever open.
Loose Strife
Everyone dreams of being harmed. It's easy. If I were to restructure the narrative,
I would start with the serial killer taking his wife's face in his hands
and nodding sagely toward the raggedy young woman by the diner door,
a baby slung on her hip. "They're the invisible ones," the killer tells his wife
who thirty years later tells the journalist who once lived as a teenage runaway
hopping from rig to rig. I have never had to force myself to stay awake
as the journalist did as she hitched cross-country. I have never had
to adopt extreme behaviors in order to stay alive. But once I needed help
and every single person who drove by pretended they couldn't see me,
ostensibly me a dirty black woman in an oversized coat
standing by the ATM. In the article the journalist details
the night a trucker pulled a knife on her then told her to run
then a different night when a woman's mangled body was found
in a truck-stop dumpster as the cab the journalist was riding in
sat filling up, all over the landscape the young runaways tortured
and killed, pierced with metal, their bodies completely shaved.
So many ways to be invisible, so many ways to be erased.
On the traffic island by the westside Target a man with his cardboard sign
saying any little thing will help. Everyone dreams of being harmed.
Much tougher to recover from the dream of harming...
The other time I went invisible I went invisible for six whole weeks.
It was November. I stood as my hands slowly froze, the whole world passing me by
even as I started crying. After 9/11 a friend joked that a black man
in a UPS uniform and a truck could still go anywhere he pleased.
Tonight if I could go anywhere I would go back to that afternoon
when the last photo of her was taken. She's so young, her body a sapling
her smile goofy and adolescent, self-conscious. She is sitting in the backseat
of a car, this murdered girl, the one he tortured for weeks in the back of his trailer,
stringing her up by a series of hooks before finally garroting her with bailing wire.
In the photo, I imagine she is on her way toward a body of water.
Something that will bear her up. In ancient Greek there is a noun for the blessing
of children. EUTEKVIA. Lord, have mercy on us. She is fourteen years old.
...
These poems have power, magic and grace. Hard to beat those three.
Quan Barry is spectacular, seriously. These poems move us all one step closer to a better understanding of what it is to be human beans.
Reading these poems makes you feel smarter.
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
BLURBS
“Violence across history, from Greek myth to modern American serial killers and the Cambodian genocide, animates this disturbing and graphically original fourth effort from Barry (Asylum). She utilizes dual-justified and unusually arrayed text to fit stark scenes where we find someone ‘hiding in a space meant/ for buckets and rags as// next door the soldiers/ drag away a young boy,’ or, in a modified ghazal, a witness at Golgotha watching ‘a man nailed like/ a bloody flag to two pieces of/ wood.’ Taking in ecological as well as human horror, falling gingko pods remind Barry of failing satellites, ‘all of which some day will come tumbling back.’ In a series of poems that belong together despite their diverse scenes, she tries ‘to describe the unimaginable/ in a time and a place when sadly everything is imaginable.’ Those vivid pictures, and their self-consciousness about what it means to narrate extremities, perhaps benefit from the book's origin in a collaboration between Barry and visual artist Michael Velliquette. And yet the book stands up, and stands out, on its own. 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)
365
Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher. They are shown here for publicity and review purposes. For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.
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