Vanishing Acts

by Brian Barker

Overview

In Vanishing Acts, Brian Barker cements his reputation as one of contemporary poetry’s great surrealists. These prose poems read like dreams and nightmares, fables and myths. With a dark whimsicality, Barker explores such topics as extinction, power, class, the consequences of tyranny and war, and the ongoing destruction of the environment in the name of progress.

A linked sequence of poems forms the book’s backbone, with an oracular voice from the future heralding the return—or hoped for return—of common animals. Part lyrical odes, part creation myths, part excerpts from a bizarre guide for naturalists, these poems mix fact and fiction, science and fable to create an unsettling vision of a dystopian world stricken by extinction, one where the world’s last catfish sleeps “in the shadow of a hydroelectric dam.” The imaginative language and bizarre stories of these poems are perfectly suited to capture a world that no longer makes sense: a man who wears a toupee to hide an injury inflicted by secret police, a group of villagers who make a bad bargain with a land agent.

The poems in Vanishing Acts straddle the comic and the tragic. They are by turns funny and haunting and ripe with scathing satire. They draw on the genres of speculative and science fiction as much as poetic traditions, and speak to the precarious state of man and the natural world in the twenty-first century.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809337279
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	03/11/2019
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Brian Barker is the author of two other books of poetry, The Animal Gospels and The Black Ocean (SIU Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Diagram, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, the Washington Post, the Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Colorado Denver, where he is a poetry editor for the literary journal Copper Nickel.

Read an Excerpt

Science Fair

One industrious young man has built a life-size replica of a Model T out
of tin cans and Popsicle sticks. Slumped over the steering wheel is a legless
mannequin dressed up like Ford himself: a mothballed wool suit, a bowtie
stapled on just below the Adam's apple, a thin, brown wig leaking little curds
of glue. From the abyss where the engine would be, a set of red jumper cables
creeps out like an invasive vine, winding through the cafeteria, twisting around
chairs and tables, snaking behind the high stainless steel counters, over the
kitchen tile scalded with ammonia, and out a back door propped open so the
mice can escape. A group of children and their teacher follow the cables out
into the desert dusk, climbing a steep slope of scree to a plateau above the
school. Here, a feverish Audubon in a bathrobe, his face pixelated with sweat,
circles an eagle chained to a perch, jotting down measurements and notes.
The cables disappear into a crude surgical incision in the center of the bird's
chest. "John James Audubon, the father of modern ornithology," the teacher
intones, wiping his spectacles with a dirty hankie. "Aquila chrysaetos-when
Ford cranks the switch, it'll light up like a pinball machine!" The children
nod, wide-eyed, open their notebooks, and poise their pencils. In one pocket
of Audubon's robe, the heads of nestlings bob up and down like hot pistons.
Their bald, pink cries keep filling in the blanks.


Bats

They will crawl out of the ashes of cold barbecue pits. Their wings will be
cut from the backs of chimney sweeps. They will hang from the antlers of
an elk like a congress of drowsy trapeze artists. At dusk above houses, they
will appear and disappear and appear, weaving a jagged cotillion through the
trees. Their songs will travel before them like aneurysms on strings, shattering
streetlights, car alarms, nerves. When winter comes too early, we will see
their faces in our frostbitten fruit. Insomniac, they will be your alphabet at
the window. Sleeper, they will be the jewelry of your death, tangled in silk
pajamas, in a wet beehive of hair.


Tubas

A military band squeezed inside a bomb shelter. Buttons bursting, plumes
razing cobwebs draped from the ceiling. The flautists were crushed against a
wall, wilting like lilies. The bored saxophonists primped in the bells of their
horns. But the tubas loomed in the middle, blubbering back and forth like
hung-over lumberjacks commiserating about a heat wave. The conductor
tapped his baton, just wanting a moment of silence before the fire rained
down. But the tubas, hammered from the bowels of walrus, kept bellowing,
the red-faced men teetering beneath them. "Who was blowing whom full
of bluster and menace?" we asked, when a team of oxen pulled their bodies
from the rubble, still yoked to their Cyclopes, to those brass ampersands
shining in the sun.


Wolves

Their fur coats will be like saints' beards soaked in wind. Their eyes will be
bone buttons winking in the bramble. They will raid the barnyard, then trot
into town, leaving a loose crewel of bloody paw prints on the marble steps of
the opera house. In the orchestra pit, the mob will cut open their stomachs
and find doll heads, hammers, locomotive smoke, ballet slippers, and the
hoof of an ox. They will flee our towns for one thousand years, the dry forests
flaming up around them like a box of ancient cigars. When we adjust our
dials from some distant place, we will hear only the echo of a loneliness they
do not feel. Their howls the zero of radio collars buried in deep snow.


The Book of Orders

The nuns, disguised as geese, clog the public parks. Their beaks snap like dull
gardening shears as they flush out the whoremongers and wankers skulking
in the azaleas. Between the playground and the parking lot, they leave a sign
in the grass: a chalky, viridescent mosaic of shit that, from the air, looks like
a Cubist pietà. Each evening they descend in perfect concentric circles onto
the grounds of the convent. Through the tall hedges you can hear, just prior
to their landing, the sound of wings collapsing, their wimples unfurling
with the starched and synchronized efficiency of a choir of black umbrellas
opening inside a cloud. When one dies, she leaves behind not the body, but
a pile of feathers. In the cloister tower, where a single candle burns in the
window, a eunuch dips a quill in his blood and records the death in the Book
of Orders. In a jam jar, deep in the pocket of his cowl, a handful of cyanide
pellets glow with a faint phosphorescence.

Table of Contents

1

Science Fair 3

Uncle Z's Toupee 4

Strong Man 5

Evel Knievel 6

Elephant 7

The Land Agent 8

In the Valley of Plenty 9

Vanishing Act 10

Rural Electrification 11

Symbiosis 12

2 Re-Creation Myths

Sea Anemones 15

Hippopotamuses 16

Bats 17

Elk 18

Slugs 19

Pigs 20

Lobsters 21

Turkey Vultures 22

3

Dream in Which We Eat the World 25

The Secrets of Eroticism 26

Blizzard 27

Experimental Mating Rituals for the Nearly Extinct 28

Murder Ballad 29

Charon's Pawn Shop 30

Night Class at the School of Metaphysics 31

Tubas 32

Blindfold 33

Civil War 34

4 Re-Creation Myths

Wolves 37

Oxen 38

Pelicans 39

Cottonmouths 40

Daddy Longlegs 41

Gila Monsters 42

Moths 43

Oysters 44

5

Owls 47

The Book of Orders 48

The Heart of a Rabbit 49

Black Hole 50

Lost in Translation 51

A Story of Teeth 52

Risk Management 53

Afterlife 54

The Future of Loneliness 55

Field Recording 56

Acknowledgments & Notes 59

Editorial Reviews

With its complex imagistic shingling and sensitivity to a world accelerating its own erasure, Vanishing Acts serves as a countermeasure to the fear of such disappearance. These poems don’t evaporate, they resonate. They ‘rise in ecstatic waves’ of the mythical, the marvelous, and the revelatory as Barker two-steps between tenderness and menace. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these cinematic compositions, with their salute to Francis Ponge, startle with extraordinary figurative language. Barker’s poems are exquisitely bizarre documentations, both ethnographic and zoographic, lit with such intelligence and insight that I’m swayed to believe there’s hope for us after all.”—Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos

“Vanishing Acts is an archive of curiosities, an homage to the ardor of our exhausting, consuming, and beautiful preoccupations. Barker's imagination is as resourceful as it is original, repurposing whatever elsewheres it has at hand: the daddy longlegs, the elephants of Carthage, the Marquis de Sade reincarnated into a fly. The collection’s title suggests the disappearance of a world we'll never know in the same way again, but this is also a book about what persists, what re-creates, and what refuses, beyond reason or the appearances of things, to ever really die.”—David Keplinger, author of Another City

“Barker’s new book is a collection of darkly comic fabular prose poems for the ‘nearly extinct.’ He brings his sardonic humor, mythic sensibility, and linguistic inventiveness to these deadpan character-driven vignettes, apocalyptic beast fables, and dramatic monologues spoken by a range of quirky absurdists and grotesques. Although life in Barker’s prose poems is marked by a sense of omnipresent menace, the abiding mood is one of wry appreciation of mystery and marvels, even at their most bizarre or calamitous.”—Anna Journey, author of The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

“Vanishing Acts is kaleidoscopic in its brilliance. These prose poems are gems in which wolves’ ‘fur coats will be like saints’ beards soaked in wind,’ grass sprouts from every step of the elk, and cottonmouths ‘swim out of the hair of the drowned.’ These poems are masterful and strange, depicting the twilight of human cruelty in a world on the cusp of rebirth. Inhabited by characters ranging from a strong man and Evel Knievel to a fish thief and monks, each of Barker’s poems is cinematically adroit and lavishly steeped in a sacred gloom: a girl tells the police officer questioning her that the ‘dog was clear like water, like a ghost trying to get in out of the rain;’ soldiers killed in a civil war reenactment are forgotten and bereft of an opportunity for resurrection. Barker flourishes the approaching darkness with sparks and makes uncanny joys in his little, irresistible worlds.”—Alex Lemon, author of Another Last Day and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards
 

From the Publisher