Burn

In Burn, Barbara Hamby returns to her signature power-odes full of humor and wonder. She’s a poet equally at ease with old-timey gods and goddesses, cherry Kool-Aid, and Cracker Jack. Her wit and wisdom are the prizes we dig for in each of her poems as she helps us navigate the terrifying world of environmental devastation and dangerous political nonsense. Who else but Barbara Hamby could respond to propaganda and misinformation with a hefty abecedarian ode to the beauty and truth of the English language? She is fearless and she is peerless. She is poets' own Lady Luck to the rescue “looking like Glinda/in The Wizard of Oz.”

Barbara Hamby’s big, bawdy odes burn with the hard-won wisdom and delirious energy of a “grown woman” who has lived to tell the tale. Hamby references Whitman for good reason. The wide lines of a panicked chatterbox insist on taking up space; the drive of embodied vigor from the heart, “with all its swelling / crescendos and arias of accordion classics,” and the brain, full of “Hamlet and refrigerator / warranties,” threatens to rupture the very edges of the page. I love the Penelope-like weaving and unweaving of so-called high and low culture. From Horace and Rimbaud to Athena, with her “howitzer tits and a brain the size of Olympus,” Apollo and Caravaggio occupying the same poem as “Easter bunnies in hula skirts,” and Persephone showing up in the bowling alley of the speaker’s soul. There is grief here, of course. Family grief, and grief for the land, all enwrapped in the orange cape of political grief, but never low-octane grief, even as we search the TV for “a new / show, starring our beautiful hideous selves,” even as we must admit the party’s over. Still, in Barbara Hamby’s hands, language and the ode are “amok and running.”