The cover of Quan Barry’s latest poetry collection features an unlikely image: a translucent, almost ghostlike toilet made of polyester. The sculpture, made by Do Ho Suh, is perhaps emblematic of Barry’s larger project in Auction: to turn toward matters we typically shy away from—and make art out of them.

As a poet and novelist, Barry refuses to look away from the darker corners of the human psyche, using her writing to reckon with our simultaneous capacities for violence and transcendence. Her novels have followed the stories of a woman born during the Vietnam War who is able to speak with the dead; a field hockey team in Danvers, Massachusetts, experimenting with witchcraft; and a pair of telepathic twins traveling the Mongolian steppe in search of the reincarnation of a Buddhist master. Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, is no less ambitious, providing a searing inquiry into violence and voyeurism, what it means to take refuge in a world seemingly defined by war, and, ultimately, how to take seriously Thich Nhat Hanh’s notion of interbeing in the face of racism and xenophobia.

Vivid, haunting, and at times hypnotic, Barry’s poetry forces us to reconsider what we have taken for granted and to look anew at our relationships with the people and things that make up our livesworld. Along the way, she puts forth a variety of visions of freedom, including the freedom that comes from letting go. As she asks in “Keur Moussa,” “What am I writing my way toward? / Release? Damnation? Is damnation / a kind of release, the way you’re left / no longer awaiting the worst?” Whether it’s toward release or damnation, Barry offers a guide to a world that is of the nature to burn—and to the “majesty and joy and struggle” that persist regardless.

–Sarah Fleming

By the Shore of Lake Monona, This is What I Heard

May all achieve equilibrium,
may all have access to the tools
to acquire equilibrium
like the story of his first day in town,
the young monk walking by an ATM
which emits a small sound as he passes,
the sound as if the machine
is greeting him, saying welcome, stranger!
the first in that foreign place to do so.
In turn the monk bows to the machine,
silently sending mettā its way,
loving kindness, that it may know peace
and be serene in the world.
And so it goes. Each time the monk passes
he wishes the small contraption ease,
then one day while making his rounds
he hears a beep, looks to see a bill
suddenly hanging from the machine’s
steel lips. We must not lose sight
of the oneness in all things. Per-
severe. The monk bows deeply.

90° and It’s Still Only Spring

I paint my nails mint in an attempt to cool myself.
High winds and the Strawberry moon paddle is canceled.
At the all-day retreat at Deer Park, the lama tells us
we must wish that all sentient beings have the tools
to achieve happiness. Bub, look around, I silently think.
We are of a nature to burn. We have not gone beyond burning.
Behind me, the kid with the prayer wheel like a god with a world.

Refuge

Neither          the            estrangement
nor               the               homecoming,
nor            the            four         dormant
orchids            on              the             sill.
Not       glitter         or         the      dust,
exegesis                  or               wonder,
the               unfathomable             love
stilled           at               land’s         end.
Not   the    resistance,      the   doubt,
the   unchecked   box,  the rejection,
the            heart’s            soft         crown
left  slightly  puckered   by  the scar.
Not nights in the interminable dark
down             on             the           knees.
Not   the   story  or   the  afterimage,
light   streaming  around  the  body,
its                  grim                  pilgrimage.
Not    what    is.      Not    what    isn’t.
Neither       air         nor       the    void.
Neither   the   here      nor   the  there.
Just this.

Black Pastoral

So why not live like that, what Michael
thought I meant when I said
the squirrel holds onto nothing

even as it buries its unburnished gold
in the dark? Why not be the soft paw
that turns the earth then yields, trusting

the thing will be there waiting, sustenance
for the winter road, or if not needed
will spark into this, these green capitals

under which we are hushed
and lifted up, called to testify
in these spaces that historically

have not made space for us?
Whose streets? Our streets.
Whose hills? Our hills.

Whose northern violets?
Whose red-tailed hawks?
Whose tall-grass prairie?

Our tall-grass prairie.
Our oak. Our spruce. Our ash.
Our broad-banded forest snails.

Our foxes red as rust.
Who keeps us safe?
We keep us safe.

Whose majesty and joy and struggle?
Whose voices rising in the growing light
on the mountain?

Who unlocks the gateless gate
and holds it open regardless?

♦

“By the Shore of Lake Monona, This is What I Heard”; “90° and It’s Still Only Spring”; “Refuge”; and “Black Pastoral” from Auction by Quan Barry © 2023. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.