Haunted city
Julie Brooks Barbour’s exciting new book, Haunted City, occupies the edge between poetry and fable, dream and nightmare. These vivid prose poems, themselves between genres, construct a terrifying metropolis of desire. Enter Haunted City at your own risk. Its citizens are dangerous to others and themselves, their encounters ghostly and perilous. -Stuart Dischell, author of Backwards Days and Dig Safe Julie Brooks Barbour possesses a unique and brilliant mind, and her poetry reflects her originality, which may at first appear demure and modest (“a minor accomplishment,” she says) but in toto becomes nothing short of an earthquake. “I stand still in the fading light,” she tells us, “my heart like a living thing.” Like! This book of prose poems, or perhaps it is a short novel with poetic lines backlit by lightning, is mysterious and involving, indeed haunting. Barbour is a true poet with a muse at her side. As she explains, what she has created is “really what someone else created when I relinquished control.” -Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems In this brilliant new collection of prose texts, Julie Brooks Barbour reminds us of the vast emotional landscapes that accumulate around everyday things: a suitcase, a dress, a cigarette lighter. The carefully chosen images in this collection blaze with hidden significance. As the book unfolds, Barbour skillfully reveals the myriad ways that the objects surrounding us become sedimented with history. Presented in brief glimpses of lyric prose, an extended sequence of image-driven evocations, Barbour gives us experimental writing at its very best, offering innovations in form and technique that are thought-provoking as they are charged with affect and suspense. This is an accomplished book by a truly remarkable writer. -Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014