Kirjahaku

Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize. Says Daniel Tobin, "Barber's poems ask us 'to register each shifting of the air, ' and they do so with a contemplative brilliance rare in contemporary American poetry." Martha Collins adds, "Like masterful drawings, Jennifer Barber's Works on Paper calls our attention to every carefully executed line. Spare, suggestive, their images speak both for and beyond the fragility of existence. Barber offers us 'collisions of light and dark' that are 'impossible to divide.' The poet knows that 'Nothing will be saved'; but for us and for future readers, these beautiful poems will linger.

In her fourth collection, Jennifer Barber explores the facts and fascination of daily living as well as the greatest challenges of the spirit, and does so in a way that shows us the unbreakable connections between them. Says Afaa M. Weaver, "In The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, we see the ecology of compassion and hopefulness, a fragile latticework made of the concern for how all things might fall away in a world seeming to be too full of loss. With a meticulousness like the Zen of poets in ancient China, Barber takes us to a place where we can believe there will always be a chance to breathe, even as we feel the terror of life in the beauty of its most minute details. These are finely crafted poems with turns on the torso of history and the times in which we live as if those things are a single tree of life, and they are. Barber teaches us how to know subtlety, how it can bring a fullness to us, a light without limits."