Auction - University of Pittsburgh Press

Auction

Poems

She takes the crap of existence head-on, and makes art despite it.

Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

A New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2023

In Auction, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how and why we construct a self in order to navigate the world.

More Praise

Barry risks the lurid, and the knowing, but comes out more like a prophet, overwhelmed—sometimes sublimely so—by the first- and second-hand truths she must convey.

Publishers Weekly on Loose Strife

Barry offers a difficult, sophisticated look at violence in personal, historical, and textual forms.

Booklist on Loose Strife

The existential pulse is strong in the pages of Loose Strife because of the unrelenting evidence that human life (particularly female life) is collateral damage to humanity’s political machinations and cultural dogmata. Values that are designed for instruction are (mis)used for destruction.

Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Review of Books on Loose Strife

Auction will leave readers feeling intrigued and challenged, but willing to see the beauty in life’s ugliness.

Tone Madison

Table of Contents

Sample

96 Pages, 5.7 x 8.7 in.

September, 2023

isbn : 9780822967170

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / General

about the author

Quan Barry is the author of three previous poetry collections: Asylum, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; Controvertibles; and Water Puppets, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. Barry has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and fiction. She is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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