Auction

Description

Poems about the Freedom That Arises When We Finally Let Go  In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how and why we construct a self in order to navigate the world.  

Praise for Loose Strife:  “Barry risks the lurid, and the knowing, but comes out more like a prophet, overwhelmed—sometimes sublimely so—by the first- and second-hand truths she must convey.” —Publishers Weekly starred review 

Praise for Loose Strife: 
“Barry offers a difficult, sophisticated look at violence in personal, historical, and textual forms.” —Booklist  Praise for Loose Strife: “An intriguing aesthetic choice in this book is Barry’s use of the self-referential. . . . Some of this initially comes across as unnecessary exposition, but turns out to be a declaration of a calling to follow a most disquieting muse, a sustained exploration of a moment of despair expressed in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: ‘Where will it end? / Where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hate, this Fury?’ Loose Strife, which ultimately stitches together the dark history of humanity into a single volume of verse, is Barry’s most compelling response yet to that question: hate doesn’t end, hate doesn’t stop.” —Los Angeles Review of Books    Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Barry is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including the novel When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East. She is one of a select group of writers to receive National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction. In 2021 her novel We Ride Upon Sticks was awarded the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Barry’s first play production, The Mytilenean Debate, premiered in spring 2022. She is currently Forward Theater’s first ever writer-in-residence. 

APARTMENT A, UNIT 2   —after Do Ho Suh  

 

That place on the bottom of any sandy lake  

where sometimes I see it in the 30-odd seconds  

I can go without breathing, there undulating   

among the lake grass, this silent presence,   

how this is just another way to think of it, this   

the apartment’s equivalent—what it looks like   

when the refrigerator leaves its own body, the afterimage   

as even an appliance is allowed to remember   

that once it was infinite   

and still is, home like a medusa, that ghostly lantern  

pulsing in the dark, the things we see   

in the first moments after we pull the cord  

and throw the world into night: this house is souled,  

this room is souled, this toilet souled, the stove  

souled, beyond good and evil, beyond the body’s   

steel and glass, beyond even the metaphor of the soul   

as a pillar of light, as a thing we can only intuit,  

pray we have.  

 

AUCTION     

What was I wearing?  

. . .     

  

I don’t recall.  

. . .     

  

I remember walking down a series of switchbacks  

away from the Italianate mansion  

where all of her children died.  

. . .     

  

Night was entering, inching over the world  

horizontally from right to left, the moon’s structured whiteness  

an objet d’art.  

. . .     

  

Then we arrived at the beautiful space  

filled with beautiful gold-flecked people.  

. . .     

  

Everywhere strings of light, illuminated filigree,  

a world webbed with stars, the feeling of bodily effervescing.  

. . .     

  

No, I hadn’t been to the track.  

. . .     

  

I’d heard that was where squalor lived,  

a barely contained seediness that was allowed.  

. . .     

  

I am one who has been reared to prefer the cultivated,   

even the men trailing with push brooms   

in tuxedoes as they sweep up the bready droppings  

that break apart so easily,  

loosing their fragrance of grass and earth.  

. . .     

 

Why should this veneer fail me now?  

. . .     

  

Watching the crowd lean forward, smelling their hunger,  

the sound of the gavel falling like a cudgel on a head,  

and the good people rushing forward  

to shake the hand of the victorious.  

. . .     

  

I saw our history in it,   

roped right there in the ring.  

. . .     

  

The muscled beauty of excellence, the monocular acuity,  

how the breadth of the eye  

evolved for speed.  

. . .     

  

It stood on the dais as the groom lovingly turned   

its best side to the light, its best side  

being every side, coat gleaming like blackest water.  

. . .     

  

The whole room instantly aroused—  

the men’s pants tenting, the women with their sudden secretions  

as happens when you are in the presence   

of the holiest of forms.  

. . .     

  

It was looking at us with an awareness beyond time,   

casting its fifty-foot parabolic gaze   

broadly over the earth.  

. . .     

  

Admittedly, as my mind filled with images   

of heated brands and whips, I thought of Christ last,  

the petals of blood licking His face.  

. . .     

  

It was every being who has ever stood centerstage in chains—  

all of us implicated simply by being there  

regardless of sympathy or intent.  

. . .     

  

Ecce homo.  

. . .     

  

Then I heard a voice shout “2.2”   

and another go higher.  

. . .     

  

The most pragmatic teaching Jesus ever gave:  

render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,  

render unto God what is God’s.  

. . .     

  

The gavel finally falling on 2.8 million.  

. . .     

  

But what if we don’t know the difference?  

. . .     

  

No, it wasn’t just my presence   

that made me a participant to spectacle, which explains   

why I’ve carried this haunting ever since.  

. . .     

  

He said the poor will be with us always,  

and I ran with it—I let it  

let me off the hook.  

. . .     

  

Then the groom, tuxedo dark as ink,   

himself descended from such brutality,   

turned and led it out. 

 

 

 

LIVING FOSSIL, LIVING GOD    

Admittedly, there is something about its face,  

the boxy pugilistic snout, the prehistoric eyes  

that seem to stare down through   

  

80 million years back to the very days of T-rex.  

Though taxonomically the frilled shark is no snake  

cutting through the lightless waters 5,000 feet down,  

  

the creature looks to be the very essence   

of the reptilian brain—cold-blooded, beyond  

even the crocodile, that seemingly soul-less   

  

armory of plates, a creature grounded wholly in the now  

with no inner life beyond the moment. What would it be  

to be this presence skirting through the dark  

  

with its rows of teeth, a consciousness beyond mind   

that watches what mind does, its sorrows,  

a being that grows its young for three and a half years  

  

in the dark night of its belly, the longest gestation   

of any in the animal kingdom, and how it only comes to us   

from time to time, pulled up in some fisherman’s net   

  

for all to behold the undying wonders of the sea?   

To have lived on into the anthropocene,    

this creature mostly blind, simply structured, unchanging,  

  

feeding on small squids and fishes, others of its kind—   

please don’t misunderstand. I believe God does not exist  

in time, but because we do, we cannot understand It.  

   

But imagine eighty million years, passing second by second.  

When I look at this silvery beast, I see God.  

 

 

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 6 × 9 in