Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 54
- Language: English
- Date Published: November 2023
- ISBN 978-1-953252-92-0
Praise
The paired nouns of Jason Barry’s title Fossil & Wing evoke persistence and flight, death and elevation. Like William Blake, Barry has the gift of thinking in images and opposites, realized in human predicaments—but here, images as vividly contemporary as the “steam stick” on a bathroom window after a shower, or the weeds on a train track: emblems in a terrain of losses and reflections. — Robert Pinsky
There is a subtle clarity of voice in these poems—the way they create and hold space for the unspoken emotion, the feeling we may not even quite realize that we have. At their best, the poems in Fossil & Wing use all the skills of poetry—exemplary skill with meter and its often ingenious structuring of formal poetic elements—to create a safe space in which to become more human. — Annie Finch
The sonic and visual precision in Jason Barry’s Fossil & Wing makes for startling discoveries: “a crush of brittle leaves beneath the stride/and how at certain times, the wind would/shape the fumes into a fox behind our truck/” (“Pruning”). What flies or escapes, winged, of the fossil rock of memory, “glazed fresh or drawn in rubato light” (“Tracks”) is as gorgeous as it is unexpected, I am reminded of Dickinson and Stevens, and an expansive reticence in the lyric tradition which Barry’s gifts continue. — Adrianne Kalfopoulou
What is remarkable in Jason Barry’s poems is their powerful focus on the details of individual experience, often captured as a tension between tender lyricism and emotional violence, between a certain formal and tonal discretion and a perfect knowledge of the world’s cruelty. “Sensory is synonym for soul,” he declares, and the work in Fossil & Wing confirms this formula at every turn. — Karl Kirchwey
Excerpt
Together Still
Imagine now that we could still be friends,
that I could take back everything I said,
the awkward gesture, the mistimed amends,
that I’d been cautious when I went ahead.
We’d meet on weekends, take the kids to walk
along the river, enjoy the breeze and view.
(Our wives would lag behind so they could talk).
I’d try to keep myself from watching you,
your torso lovely, the way you would stand
beside the water when we were away.
I’d tell myself to not reach for your hand
or say the things I said that other day.
The lives we now have would not then exist
if I had stopped when you tried to resist.
Author
Jason Barry holds an MFA from Boston University and is pursuing further studies at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Crab Creek Review, Bad Lilies, Poet Lore, Thrush Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and other awards and his poetry was selected by Ada Limón to feature on The Slowdown. He has been offered artist scholarships and grants from Poetry by the Sea, Boston University, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.