ReadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2025

Auction

Poems

Amy Quan Barry author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press

Published:31st Jan '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Auction cover

Poems about the Freedom That Arises When We Finally Let Go

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.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.

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

-- Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times

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 Madis

ISBN: 9780822967170

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

96 pages