Bite Every Sorrow [Paperback]

Barbara Ras (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1998

Winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets, Given in Memory of Eric Mathieu King "This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning."-C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?" Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:" But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone-how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Ras's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious." Highly recommended for all public libraries.?Frank Allen, North Hampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Ras plunges beneath the skin of consciousness and tumbles in the mind's coursing, then gets her bearings and sends her tidings in poems that surge across the page like waves on a beach. The tropical ocean, lined with palms and shimmering with flashing, silvery life, is, in fact, her habitat of choice, but wherever she places her poetic persona, she navigates life with her senses on full alert. Everything she witnesses, overhears, ingests, and touches is a catalyst for her penetrating imagination, which turns even the simplest things iridescent with myriad shades of meaning. Witty and ardent, Ras marvels at marriage, motherhood, and memory; compassionate and generous, she ponders loneliness, grief, and poverty, swinging readily from the private to the global, the everyday to the eternal. Entranced by motion, she elevates journeys on buses and trains to metaphorical rites of passage, then muses over questions of proximity. Look how close we can be without making contact: no wonder love is miraculous. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, this is a sonorous and enrapturing collection. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (April 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807122645
• ISBN-13: 978-0807122648
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant contemporary poetry, June 29, 2009

By 

Dale Peterson (Arlington, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bite Every Sorrow (Paperback)

This is contemporary poetry at its best: brilliant, funny, and direct. There are no private puzzles here, no clever obscurities. Just smart observations, surprising imagery, sharp language.

5.0 out of 5 stars "I used to dream souls, puffed up and sighing", March 24, 2006

By 

odds and ends - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bite Every Sorrow (Paperback)

BITE EVERY SORROW is a multihued book full of both a strange sadness and the glowing wonder of laughter. "If there are oceans to saddle/ if you could get there, catch the horse/ if you are holy, long enough/ the suger will be taken from your right hand." Ras writes. She provides the saddle, and if you are holy enough, it will certainly give you an exhilarating ride through the lush scenery of her soul.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful!, April 9, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bite Every Sorrow (Hardcover)

Ras discribes everyday life as if it were all genuine feelings. Wonderful discriptive language that paints many bright colored pictures.