Customer Reviews

Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series)

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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!

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.