Description
Book SynopsisThis Isabella Gardner Poetry Award-winning book-length poem is a medley of voices in dialogue with each otheroverheard, remembered, and internalthat represents a mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of human nature, the hypocrisy and artifice of the American dream. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news reports, and famous poets fill these pages, ultimately capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential.
Christian Barter is the author of two previous poetry collections: In Someone Else’s House and The Singers I Prefer. Living in Bar Harbor, ME, he is the centennial Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park.
Trade ReviewWinner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award "Christian Barter's brilliant song of ourselves is Walt Whitman filtered through The Waste Land. Bold and broken-hearted and up-to-the-minute, it is a visionary elegy for America in dozens of dead-on voices you hear every day on the train, in the halls, across the breakfast table. Bye-Bye Land virtually reads itself to you; all you have to do is listen." James Richardson "What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believea difficult artistic featthat poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctor’s office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are'Oh yes,' you think, 'that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart'" Tony Hoagland "There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously." Sydney Lea
Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award "Christian Barter's brilliant song of ourselves is Walt Whitman filtered through The Waste Land. Bold and broken-hearted and up-to-the-minute, it is a visionary elegy for America in dozens of dead-on voices you hear every day on the train, in the halls, across the breakfast table. Bye-Bye Land virtually reads itself to you; all you have to do is listen." —James Richardson "What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believe—a difficult artistic feat—that poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctor’s office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are—'Oh yes,' you think, 'that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart—'" —Tony Hoagland "There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously." —Sydney Lea
Table of ContentsTable of Contents Part 1: The Warm Land Part 2: The Meaning of Being Numerous Part 3: And All the Lives to Be Part 4: Secret Evidence Part 5: The Print of the Nails or The Rest Is Silence
