Water Puppets

by Quan Barry

Overview

Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry

In her third poetry collection, Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. In the long poem “meditations” Barry examines her own guilt in initially supporting the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the manuscript she investigates war and its aftermath by negotiating between geographically disparate landscapes—from the genocide in the Congo—to a series of pros poem “snapshots” of modern day Vietnam. Despite the gravity of war, Barry also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822961604
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	08/28/2011
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Quan Barry is the author of two previous poetry collections: Asylum and Controvertibles. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she directs the MFA program in creative writing.

Editorial Reviews

The poems in Barry's third collection are fragments of violence melded together. Her poem "Meditations," has quick-paced leaps from China to Iraq often switching in time or place within a phrase. Her frenetic form reflects the contemporary world's unceasing access to information. Peace is nothing but a man in the rain: "He is getting wet, his sign soggy. Peace. Some passersby/ flip him off." Her language is unnerving and relentless. In another of her longer poems, "Reportage," Barry's line breaks are disorienting and disconcerting: "in a voice-over a man is singing the melody delicate/ like a bird made of paper someone is floating/ face down in a body of stagnant water." "Thanksgiving" grafts the American holiday complete with turkey ("Where do the viscera ever go?") with Mohammed Halim, murdered by the Taliban in 2006 for educating girls. "The men took out half his bowel,/ the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him/ ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart." Even her more tranquil poems about Peru contain these dark currents. "I wish it my suffering,// this hardening in me,/I give the bird/ with its tearing feet// my pain." Barry's poems dwell in "the dark traps where things collect." She confesses that "the truth is my true shattering is moral/ I want to change but I can't." (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

These poems impress with the enormous and energetic distances they travel. More impressive, however, is the focus they show on arrival. We are everywhere, but everywhere is distinctly somewhere—and often dangerous. These words are the essence of displacement. Yet these poems do not stop there, are not so easy on themselves, speaking in a clear voice for the new as well as the past. They relentlessly address their—and our—changing and unchanging world against the loose backdrop of Vietnamese water puppet theater, whose imaginative traditions show themselves in repeatedly memorable moments. These poems may move on water, but their voices do not falter.”
—Alberto Álvaro Ríos

“Some will find Barry’s subjects—genocidal war, pornography, the slaughter of Thanksgiving turkeys—disconcerting, but she treats them with a candor, persistence, and tonal control that aims to question and comprehend rather than simply indict or dismiss. An engrossing collection.”
—Library Journal

“What I appreciate about Barry is that she’s always pushing herself poetically to try different forms. . . . Another powerful work by Barry.”
—Asian American Literature

From the Publisher

Readers of Barry's two previous books, Asylum and Controvertibles, will recognize the signature weave of her work: the cross-hatching of world events, multicultural perspective, and autobiographical detail into sharply rendered yet fluid reflections on the impossibility of living a "guilt-free life" within the scarred moral topography of human history. Less uniform in execution than 2004's Controvertibles, the poems in this book (whose title references Vietnam's ancient art of aquatic puppet theater) span a variety of forms from short lyric to lengthy narrative, showcasing Barry's photographic eye for despair both collective (Congolese refugees "sifting down a broken road...many of them/ with the agony gouged into their bodies") and solitary ("One man standing in the slushy winter light, torso twisting/ like a weathervane as he holds/ a cardboard sign high in the air"). VERDICT Some will find Barry's subjects—genocidal war, pornography, the slaughter of Thanksgiving turkeys—disconcerting, but she treats them with a candor, persistence, and tonal control that aims to question and comprehend rather than simply indict or dismiss. An engrossing collection.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal