The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made

by Jennifer Barber

Overview

In her fourth collection, Jennifer Barber explores the facts and fascination of daily living as well as the greatest challenges of the spirit, and does so in a way that shows us the unbreakable connections between them. Says Afaa M. Weaver, "In The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, we see the ecology of compassion and hopefulness, a fragile latticework made of the concern for how all things might fall away in a world seeming to be too full of loss. With a meticulousness like the Zen of poets in ancient China, Barber takes us to a place where we can believe there will always be a chance to breathe, even as we feel the terror of life in the beauty of its most minute details. These are finely crafted poems with turns on the torso of history and the times in which we live as if those things are a single tree of life, and they are. Barber teaches us how to know subtlety, how it can bring a fullness to us, a light without limits."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781944585556
Publisher:	The Word Works
Publication date:	05/01/2022
Pages:	86
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Barber's previous poetry collections are WORKS ON PAPER (winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize); Given Away; and RIGGING THE WIND (winner of the Kore Press 2002 First Book Award). She founded the literary journal Salamander in 1992 and served as its editor in chief at Suffolk University in Boston through 2018. Recent poems have appeared in Consequence, Paris Review, Poetry, Tiferet (2019 Poetry Prize), and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and is the current poet laureate of Brookline, MA.

Table of Contents

1

Six Weeks Left 5

Elegy 6

The lamp in the borrowed room 7

End of June 8

Lake Constance 9

Continuum 10

August in Ashfield 11

The Rules Today 12

These Mornings 13

A Thousand Keys 14

2

Untitled 17

When the Outbreak Starts 18

Pregnancy Dream 19

Feast 20

In Jerusalem 21

When I Heard 23

From the Sidewalk 24

Audubon Calendar: June 25

Daughter 26

In Class 27

Overdose 28

Mesopotamian Myth 29

3

Frequency and Pitch 33

Nasturtiums 35

Where Morning 36

To a Seedpod: Questionnaire 37

The Mourner 38

Dream of Smoking in Bed 39

Orders Concerning the Jews 40

On This Day 41

Prayers, Pontevedra 43

A Still life at the Prado 44

Last Day in Zamora 45

Boston in December 46

From a Gazebo, Looking Out 47

4

Aubade 51

About My Death 52

Cezanne's "Flowers and Fruit" 53

Holbein's "Christ Lying in the Grave" 54

Hill Town 55

When I Was Able to Look 56

Surgery 57

No, It Is Not Too Soon 58

Duration 59

Mountain Outside Grenoble 61

Foothills, Memorial 62

What was it like walking in the German woods, he asks 63

To My Book 64

Buckow 65

Notes 69

About the Author & About the Artist 71

About The Word Works 73

Other Word Works Books 75