Burn

Poems

"The joy that meets the arrival of a new book by Barbara Hamby is comparable to standing before the many-chambered facade of an Advent calendar: Each page opens onto a new wonder."
Rita Dove, The New York Times

The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts everything is a mess—how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, “How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn’t. But I will.”

96 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

October, 2025

isbn : 9780822967521

Subjects

about the author

Barbara Hamby

Burn is Barbara Hamby’s eighth book of poems. Most recently she has published Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014). In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai’i, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.

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Barbara Hamby