Susan Barba’s newest poetry collection, geode, is available now from publisher Black Sparrow Press/David Godine. Barba is the author of Fair Sun and winner of the Anahid Literary Prize from the Armenian Center at Columbia University and the Minas & Kohar Tölölyan Prize. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and her poems have been translated into Armenian, German and Romanian. She lives in Cambridge, MA.
“Susan Barba’s geode is a rich, lyrical meditation on earth and its generative forces as well as its vulnerability to human desecration, violence and ignorance,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian.
A review in the Boston Globe said that “geode pulses with the blood of earth and stone. Through a lens of geography and geology, Barba looks at time, and our human efforts—sometimes futile, sometimes hopeful, sometimes cruel—to make sense of forces much larger and much older than our selves.”
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Naomi Shihab Nye says geode “is rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth, small delusions of ownership against wider backdrops of loss and time.”
With anguish and praise, in the spirit of both the ode and the elegy, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it.
Be the first to comment