Barter

"Barter exchanges history for myth, direct speech for epistles, activity for observation . . . breathtaking." —Claudia Rankine

Felix the Rat's hind feet
could be Barbie hands—
same pink, same
injection-molded seaming.—from "Electronica"

The poems in Barter, Monica Youn's exciting first collection, negotiate transactions between scarcity and excess, pornography and abstraction, the thing and the thing seen. Rendered with a dazzling array of structures and allusions, these poems describe—and bec...