geode
By Susan Barba
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About this ebook
A New England Book Award Finalist. “Rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth...Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember...”—New York Times Magazine
Susan Barba’s collection of poems resembles the spheroid stone of its name; when cracked open, a glittering and fascinating crystalline structure is revealed but the stony sphere she offers us, and the beauty within, is nothing less than the earth.
The word “geode” also houses within it “ode,” a praise poem. With both anguish and exaltation, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it. There is wonder here as well. She writes...
Oak, whose girth
exceeds my reach
forever I am
at your feet,
looking up.
Here is the world, Barba reminds us, like a ball, in our hands. Poems include “Earthwards,” “Letter from Gaia,” “River,” and “Final Letter of Stone.” geode is for anyone who loves poetry’s uniquely precise and enduring power.
Susan Barba
Susan Barba's first book Fair Sun (Godine, 2017) was awarded the Anahit Literary Prize and the Minas & Kohar Tölöyan Prize. She earned her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University and is Senior Editor at New York Review Books.
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geode - Susan Barba
Susan Barba’s second book, geode, is rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth, small delusions of ownership against wider backdrops of loss and time. Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember, create an intricate overlay of worlds, humans and trees.
Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times Magazine
With gorgeous incantations, with music that is as memorable as it is piercing, Susan Barba has given us the green-book, the earth-book, the book of justice, that shows us how endlessly, mindlessly we are ticking away, all of us clocks.
geode maps our planet’s blue-green grid,
shows us the earth itself, and our crime against it: earth the story they’re breaking.
Not a story exactly, perhaps, but a spell, a book of spells.
From the language of maps, from the language of the courtroom, from the language of the river, we are given one human’s testimony. And music, when it comes, is transformative: Oak, whose girth /exceeds my reach //forever I am /at your feet, / looking up.
Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
Susan Barba’s geode is a rich, lyrical meditation on earth and its generative forces as well as its vulnerability to human desecration, violence, and ignorance. Her poems navigate places where natural history, human imagination and man-made endeavor meet. Barba’s voice is necessary in this tragic American moment where reactionary forces are at war with science, reason, and the planet.
Peter Balakian, author of Ozone Journal
Tense and bright as a winter star, Susan Barba’s geode re-orients the senses around the sort of spiritual refreshment I thought we had relegated to nostalgia. Now, we need poems that help us survive our trouble and teach us not to lie—Barba’s brilliant Letter to Gaia
is one of these, confronting us with love