Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Quan Barry (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

U.S. nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll, children born of Vietnamese women raped by American soldiers (and those born deformed by Agent Orange) and the effects of syphilis are matched by a willing vitriol, vengefulness and accusations in Barry's speakers. A University of Wisconsin assistant English professor and former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Barry sharpens these apostrophes with rich images deftly drawn in a cold, honed poetry: "Even here in this city of a white house, you dream of clouds/ sprouting like black lungs."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Composed in an oblique, postmodern style, the poems in Barry's first book reveal a dysfunctional global society where young women are still circumcised, a teenager is nearly bludgeoned to death in her own bed, African Americans are routinely brutalized, and Siamese twins somehow survive the horrible after-effects of Agent Orange. For Barry, too, is a survivor, as she confesses in her brilliant autobiographical poem, "Child of the Enemy," the centerpiece of this collection. The poet empathizes with all the abused and marginalized characters in the book because she is an Amerasian with "shame/ on the dark meat" of her face. Her remarkable poems are studded with allusions to the Bible, Bob Dylan, Osip Mandelstam, and Yukio Mishima. The titles are dazzling, running the gamut from mathematical equations to cartoon characters. Barry holds these disparate poems together with her strongly original voice, her carefully nuanced tone, and her surprising metaphors, like the "blue scripts" of rivers. Highly recommended for large public and academic libraries. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (August 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822957698
• ISBN-13: 978-0822957690
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #516,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beauty crushing abuse and oppression, March 11, 2007

By 

Renata Emther (Private) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Quan Barry is an impressive poet. Her work shows superior craft, high intelligence, and deep empathy with wronged and violated people around the world. She always focuses on others, raising awareness about their suffering through her poetry. Our suffering, including the intimate kind. And what poetry it is! Her language is elegant and piercing, her metaphors beautiful and surprising. The Asylum has just the right degree of compression, built-in foreign words, a refreshing variety from prose poems to complex poem series, and a multitude of allusions to other writers, artists, and the Bible. It is a delight to follow her crafted lines (a real-life textbook on line breaks, dropped lines, caesura, etc.) and feel the energy in her images. For many poets nowadays, it is easy to spit on everything and everyone without offering any constructive way out of painful, pressing issues. Barry does not spit. She goes straight to the core of injustice and its consequences, and makes us aware that this is not the end, that "it is our right to ask" (Job 42.4, p. 18) and do something about it. She is the poet to follow - in every respect!

4.0 out of 5 stars careening, May 26, 2007

By 

Edna Lake "a lady prufrock" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Quan Barry's debut book starts out strong with the virtuosic announcement of her arrival on the scene in the form of the long, sectioned poem "Child of the Enemy," which deals with Barry's complicated childhood and ethnic heritage. She has a gift for dizzying shifts in style, form and syntax, careening from broken unpunctuated sestina to truncated fragments of speech. However, this energy only partly pays off: after the initial long poem, the book loses a focus and rushes along without a core, throwing in pop cultural references from Steven Seagal to Snow White and moving from plain love poems to, as the review above damningly notes, "oblique" showy pieces that turn out to be, ultimately, forgettable. But Barry has humor, vivacity and intellligence in these poems, which goes some distance toward smoothing out the flaws in this uneven but promising first book.