Works on Paper

About Jennifer Barber

Jennifer Barber’s previous collections are Given Away (Kore Press) and Rigging the Wind (recipient of Kore’s First Book Award), and Vendaval, in Take Three: 3 (Graywolf Press). Her poems have appeared in Agni, the Georgia Review, Poetry, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, she teaches literature and creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, where she is a scholar in residence. She is founding and current editor of the literary journal Salamander, published at Suffolk.

Praise for Works on Paper

Like masterful drawings, the poems in Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper call our attention to every carefully executed line. Spare, suggestive, their images speak both for and beyond the fragility of existence. Seamlessly fusing an often autumnal natural world with delicate evocations of illness, grief, and love, Barber offers us “collisions of light and dark” that are “impossible to divide.” The poet knows that “Nothing will be saved”; but for us and for future readers, these beautiful poems will linger.
—Martha Collins

Jennifer Barber’s poems in the unassumingly titled Works on Paper comprise a sequence of exquisite miniatures whose seemingly quiet surfaces harbor depths of intelligence, reference, and emotional and spiritual urgency. Barber’s poems, like the leaves in her beautiful “Source,” ask us “to register each shifting of the air,” and they do so with a contemplative brilliance rare in contemporary American poetry, so tuned as it has become to the frenetic gesture, the ironic jest. Mindful of loss, of grief, of the mythic inside the momentary, Barber’s poems release themselves across the page’s waiting absence with all the ingenuity and necessity of the finest webs—delicate, indelible.
—Daniel Tobin

Formally agile and tersely emotive, the poems of Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper—about a life of the mind, mature love, family, profound loss, and the poet’s affinity for the natural world—brim with crisp imagery and sonic precision. To give over to the trustworthy intelligence of these poems, to inhabit the world as Barber sees and painstakingly recreates it, is to come away gratified, and graced by the poet’s immense and intricate gifts. Works on Paper is a brilliant and virtuosic book, unflinching in its incisiveness.
—Maggie Dietz