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HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
By Judith Barrington
Published by The Eighth Mountain Press
ISBN 0-933377-02-9, trade paperback, $7.95
ISBN 0-933377-03-7, cloth, $15.95
FINALIST, OREGON BOOK AWARD
FINALIST, LAMBDA BOOK AWARD |
PRAISE for History
and Geography
“Judith Barrington's new book of poems is informed
by a strong sense of time and place: the specificities that
reify human interchanges for tellers and hearers of tales.
There are powerful stories here: the death of a child's parents
by shipwreck; a twenty-year-old's unnameable affair with
a woman of forty; even a lover's allergic reaction to a bee
sting fuels a vignette of confrontation with mortality. In
many poems, a formal framework inspires a reader's assurance
and fascination with this writer's craft and direction: she
knows where she is taking us—Gibraltar,
Scotland, Oregon, sites of some of her well-lived lives—and
we want to go with her as, on the way, poet, lesbian, grown woman
in a world at risk, she gives the unnameable a plethora of names.” —Marilyn
Hacker
“The poems in History
and Geography are adroit
and exact. Judith Barrington moves without missing a step from
the wry to the impassioned. She can speak of love, and is unafraid
of clarity; indeed if I had one word to use to describe the book,
it would be courage.” —Ursula K. Le Guin
“History
and Geography is traversed by a keen avenue of sound sense,
a confidence of detail, and a rich, often difficult landscape
of experience which Judith Barrington calmly, courageously explores.
I am moved and fortified by the sense of healing litany in this
work, particularly in the poems to her parents. The prose memoir,
'Fish' swims luminously alongside, helping define the vast borders
of a compassionate, generous life.” —Naomi
Shihab Nye
"Barrington's history, like Lowell's, is intensely personal;
her geography, like Bishop's, extracts the familiar from the
exotic and the exotic from the familiar." -The Nation
“Judith Barrington writes masterfully of identity,
destiny and roots.... The thirty-five poems and one prose memoir
push against safe emotional boundaries like waves crashing against
the shore. Yet Barrington does not flail away with her pen. Her
images are rendered with precision and are glorious....” —San
Francisco Chronicle
"A collection which tantalizes and satisfies
simultaneously." —13th
Moon
"I like to learn something new when I read
a book of poetry. I also like to dwell in the familiar. History
and Geography does both things for me. Barrington's sharp,
bifocal vision gives me nearby and distant physical and emotional
domains and holds them to a light I've not seen them in before." —The
Kenyon Review
"She engages wittily with cultural
differences, and gives a prominent place to what Elizabeth Bishop,
of whom her writing sometimes reminds me, called 'questions of
travel.' There is an economy of language here, a healthy and
resonating clarity." —The
Women's Review of Books
"Written in a voice at once steadfastly bold
and gently intimate…Barrington
shrewdly and unsentimentally explores the history and geography
of her life, illuminating with abundant detail raw emotions and
painful truth…. In both metered and free verse, she demonstrates
control of her material, transforming volatile feelings and almost-unspeakable
observations into cogent, vigorous poetry. Barrington deftly
and gracefully maintains urgency throughout, and the parts seamlessly
add up to a whole." —Publishers Weekly
"Her language
is glorious-riveting in the precision of the image to evoke the
constellation of sensation and emotion." —Belles
Lettres
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
LISTEN to
the author read from History and Geography:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution and Perseus Distribution. Phone: (800) 283-3572; fax (800) 351-5073; electronic ordering via PUBNET (SAN 631-760X).
Available through all major wholesalers and library jobbers.
Available in independent, chain, and internet bookstores in
the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia
and Europe, or
can be ordered directly from The Eighth Mountain Press, 624
SE 29th Avenue, Ptld, OR 97214; 503 233 3936 phone. No charge
for shipping bookrate within the U.S.
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