Tina Barr

The poems in Pink Moon examine powerlessness over the body as well as in the environment. They explore the Western North Carolina area inhabited by the Cherokee, focusing on local inhabitants and lore, before reaching outward to other geographies: Egypt, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, in patterns of circularity and juxtaposition. Ranging over varying subjects—the Tuskegee experiment, the Ku Klux Klan, sexual and physical abuse, love both transgressive and domestic, familial patterns of incest and greed—Pink Moon uses the environment Tina Barr inhabits, and the virus that inhabits her own body, as bridges to the virus in the body politic. They illuminate the idea of contagion, positing the issues of race, and species extinction as an epidemic.
 

Poetry. "It was a challenge and pleasure to read these lyric and narrative poems made by a poet who uses her sophistication to consider the lives of those for whom so much has been denied and whose rage now makes targets of us all."--Judge, Patricia Spears Jones

In her new book, Kaleidoscope, as in her other books of poems, Barr is concerned with acts of perception. In Kaleidoscope, Barr's poems reconfigure smaller and larger worlds in the way multiples in a kaleidoscope shift and reform patterns. The kaleidoscope is both a spyglass and a turning wheel. Inside these poems a cabdriver in Cairo paints his steering wheel with words from the Koran; a girl's barrette evokes the idea of the wheel's origins; and Buddhist sand paintings reproduce the wheel of the universe. The poems' subjects range across time and geographies, in settings across the South to the Middle East. Their dense iconography incorporates subjects ranging from jazz to bird life to pawn shops, Henry Darger's watercolors to the conflict between Tutsi and Hutu. These poems assemble, juxtapose and question relationships, from the troubled to the redemptive, between self and other, within family as well as within the larger human experience.

The story of The Gathering Eye is one of wonder and rediscovery as it relates the lives of the Middle East and China. Seen through the eyes of poet Tina Barr, The Gathering Eye is a collection of poems that inspire open-thought throughout the poet’s journey. This is both a physical journey as well as a cultural one, as many of the poems related include the emotions that Barr first experienced them with. Clear throughout the narrative poems in The Gathering Eye is Barr’s personal identity, perhaps suggesting the title is a nod to her individual experience. She carries her Long Island hometown throughout her many travels, writing as a sister, a daughter, and a foreigner. Barr leans into this cultural difference, working through these narratives to connect links between her own life and those she has just now discovered.