Reviews
--Jamie D'Agostino, author of Nude With Anything; Slur Oeuvre; Weathermanic; and This Much "The news was in the black glyphs on the supple birches' trunks," our poet notes in one typical moment of vision so sharp it's serrated. For Barron, all of it's news, all of it's breaking, and her dispatches from the field provide us blanket coverage. The prairie, the meadow, great lakes, rivers, Sonora, Canada, Cuba, you name it, these poems have worked that terrain, patiently undertaking the work of the imagination. And of memory--or as one astonishing poem sings its final wisdom: "I know: we lose some, / we lose some." This is a book that tallies its losses and its love of the world with equal force. One of many designs out of the mind of this architect is a series of imagined postcards that inhabit one place but reach back to another, so each poem's a bridge closing distances--sometimes great, sometimes between neighbors, or between here and the kitchen. Barron's the perfect poet to write these: armed with the photographer's eye, the traveller's restlessness, and the poet's imagined scrawl on the back of the card. She's out there, missing us, taking in the world she wants to share. I just love these poems. --Lori Desrosiers, author of The Philosopher's Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak and Keeping Planes in the Air (Salmon Poetry) In Monica Barron's book of poetry, Prairie Architecture, there is a river that sends you back to where you came from. There are bridges, postcard poems about many places, and a series of linked sonnets. There is a tribute to Alice Neel, a poem about why we need ponds, a commentary on a father's death and another on hunters. I particularly enjoyed the poems that felt more personal, like "Polar Vortex", "Lana Turner All Day" and "Midsummer Songs," which concludes with this stanza: I would have guessed tonight would be clear: clouds the color of rhubarb, clean wind crossing the meadow. But winds have a way of changing. The leaves turn their silver undersides to me, my grandmother's favorite sign of rain. I know: we lose some, we lose some.
