Want: Poems

by Rick Barot

Overview

“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier

“In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932511574
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	02/01/2008
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry published by Sarabande. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the NEA. He currently teaches at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.

Editorial Reviews

Often as vivid as it is grim, this second collection from Barot (The Darker Fall) offers unrhymed, hard-edged lines that strain with the weight of yearning, elegy, lust and frustration about the difficulty of knowing the self. Scenes from Washington, D.C., Italy and the sea evoke a persistant, if vague, pain. Against that pain Barot's stanzas and sequences promise only the reward of keen perception: "The coffee will come black inside its cup./ The bread will be made of something clean." A ghazal adds the further consolation of eros, and the further pain of shame: "I am myself in lace, rubber things, oil." The drive to immediacy, the tough, clear line, and the traces of what sounds like firsthand experience may remind some readers of Stanley Kunitz. Others may think of Lynda Hull's chronicles of a difficult life. If the shadow of death falls over the whole collection, Barot at his best keeps up, as well, an accurate light from the visible, audible world: "the dusk with a pink plastic bag/ in the tines of a branch" (Feb.)

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