[REVIEW] Loose Strife, by Quan Barry

65 pages, $15.95

Review by Colleen Abel

Quan Barry is having a good year. Her debut novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born came out to strong reviews in February, and her third book of poetry, Loose Strife, came out in January. Anyone who has read Loose Strife may not be surprised to hear that Barry is now also a successful novelist: she has a fascination with unearthing stories, and over the course of her three books, Barry has proven that the darker the tale, the more important it is to tell.

In the end notes to Loose Strife, Barry writes that many of the poems were inspired by a collaborative exhibition between her and the visual artist Michael Velliquette, and the book reads like a multimedia lecture or an artist’s talk, delivered with the pictures missing, the poems serving as the only evidence that they were there. Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has said of her early career teaching art history in New York that she would forget the details of what she was teaching during slide lectures and just stand in the dark making up stories about the images. Were it not for the poems’ impeccable craft, we might get the same sense from Loose Strife; it’s an unsettling and memorable effect.

Barry’s interdisciplinary tour through violence begins with the poem’s epigraph from Macbeth and immediately draws her audience in with imperatives: “Draw a map” she repeats in the collection’s opening poem, “[l]et yourself remember.” The next poem begins, “Listen closely as I sing this.” Singing is an important motif here: Barry’s incantatory power is partly to make sure that we do not forget the terrible wrongs that humans inflict on each other. The poems spin from the killing fields of Cambodia and the preserved tunnels in Cu Chi, Vietnam (which are now a tourist attraction) to slivers of personal narrative, as when the speaker of one poem recalls smashing insects as a child to see the “liquid forest” of their guts on the sidewalk. Alongside this insistence on memory, though, Barry tells us another truth about violence: nearly all of the poems in the book are called “loose strife,” playing partly on the idea of violence as an “invasive species” and partly recalling the “classical sense of loosing battle, sowing chaos.” The book is also undifferentiated by section breaks, which usually create thematic boundaries in poetry collections. This creates a sense of sameness, though poignantly so: it both overwhelms and creates unities, as tragedy does.

Language-wise, these poems recall some of the greatest examples of the poetry of witness. For example, they often adopt the flat or prose-like language of works like Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” one of American poetry’s most chilling renditions of human cruelty. In one of two poems titled “Craft,” Barry writes of seeing news footage from the Middle East:

Images of
the journalist herself
hiding in a space meant
for buckets and rags as

next door the soldiers
drag away a young boy
please hear it again a
child of no more than
twelve

There is that imperative again, forcing the reader not to look away. But “Craft” also points to the way that Barry slips loose of staid notions of the lyric; this poem, like so many, are manipulated into box-like shapes that recall, at times, frames of filmstrip footage or photo captions. This creates typographical oddities: the kerning of many of the box-like poems is adjusted to let in stark spaces between the words that feel chillingly like bullet holes or open wounds. Because of Barry’s stark and direct language, though, the poems never feel overly aestheticized, but rather unflinching recreations of the experience—all too common in the media-saturated 21^st century—of witnessing violence.

***

Colleen Abel is the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Wisconsin and, when she remembers, updates her website www.colleenabel.com.