University of Pittsburgh Press

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. Continue reading →