About Jennifer Barber
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.
Praise for The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
To see the world as it is, to see ourselves as we are within it. This asks that we be open to misery and beauty alike, that we embrace moments of perplexity and loss alongside the visions of wholeness. A spiritual practice of this sort guides Jennifer Barber in these new poems that range from an imagined Mesopotamia to the sickbed of a loved one, from a dog’s barking that “sounds more and more like a question” to a mother who remembers when her daughter stood at the center of the world, in “overalls and round white shoes.” With poetic precision and utmost emotional nuance, Barber invites us to see what beauty the world gives, and too often and too quickly takes away. The result: poems that shimmer with clarity, care, and love.
—FRED MARCHANT, author of Said Not Said
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.
—AFAA M. WEAVER, author of Spirit Boxing
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