Water Puppets

July 25, 2011
The poems in Barry's third collection are fragments of violence melded together. Her poem "Meditations," has quick-paced leaps from China to Iraq often switching in time or place within a phrase. Her frenetic form reflects the contemporary world's unceasing access to information. Peace is nothing but a man in the rain: "He is getting wet, his sign soggy. Peace. Some passersby/ flip him off." Her language is unnerving and relentless. In another of her longer poems, "Reportage," Barry's line breaks are disorienting and disconcerting: "in a voice-over a man is singing the melody delicate/ like a bird made of paper someone is floating/ face down in a body of stagnant water." "Thanksgiving" grafts the American holiday complete with turkey ("Where do the viscera ever go?") with Mohammed Halim, murdered by the Taliban in 2006 for educating girls. "The men took out half his bowel,/ the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him/ ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart." Even her more tranquil poems about Peru contain these dark currents. "I wish it my suffering,// this hardening in me,/I give the bird/ with its tearing feet// my pain." Barry's poems dwell in "the dark traps where things collect." She confesses that "the truth is my true shattering is moral/ I want to change but I can't."

July 1, 2011

Readers of Barry's two previous books, Asylum and Controvertibles, will recognize the signature weave of her work: the cross-hatching of world events, multicultural perspective, and autobiographical detail into sharply rendered yet fluid reflections on the impossibility of living a "guilt-free life" within the scarred moral topography of human history. Less uniform in execution than 2004's Controvertibles, the poems in this book (whose title references Vietnam's ancient art of aquatic puppet theater) span a variety of forms from short lyric to lengthy narrative, showcasing Barry's photographic eye for despair both collective (Congolese refugees "sifting down a broken road...many of them/ with the agony gouged into their bodies") and solitary ("One man standing in the slushy winter light, torso twisting/ like a weathervane as he holds/ a cardboard sign high in the air"). VERDICT Some will find Barry's subjects--genocidal war, pornography, the slaughter of Thanksgiving turkeys--disconcerting, but she treats them with a candor, persistence, and tonal control that aims to question and comprehend rather than simply indict or dismiss. An engrossing collection.--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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