Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series)

Asylum (Pitt Poetry Series)

• Used Book in Good Condition

<div>Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize<BR>2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors<BR><BR>Quan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s <I>Ariel</I> for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by <I>The Matrix</I>.<BR><BR><I>Asylum</I>  is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from <I>Casablanca</I>  is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems.<BR><BR>Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, <I>Asylum</I> finds a haven by not looking away.<BR></div>