Bye-Bye Land

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This Isabella Gardner Poetry Award-winning book-length poem is a medley of voices in dialogue with each otheroverheard, remembered, and internalthat represents a mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of human nature, the hypocrisy and artifice of the American dream. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news reports, and famous poets fill these pages, ultimately capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential.

Christian Barter is the author of two previous poetry collections: In Someone Elses House and The Singers I Prefer. Living in Bar Harbor, ME, he is the centennial Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park.

Reviews

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award "Christian Barter's brilliant song of ourselves is Walt Whitman filtered through The Waste Land. Bold and broken-hearted and up-to-the-minute, it is a visionary elegy for America in dozens of dead-on voices you hear every day on the train, in the halls, across the breakfast table. Bye-Bye Land virtually reads itself to you; all you have to do is listen." James Richardson "What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believea difficult artistic featthat poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctors office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are'Oh yes,' you think, 'that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart'" Tony Hoagland "There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously." Sydney Lea
Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award "Christian Barter's brilliant song of ourselves is Walt Whitman filtered through The Waste Land. Bold and broken-hearted and up-to-the-minute, it is a visionary elegy for America in dozens of dead-on voices you hear every day on the train, in the halls, across the breakfast table. Bye-Bye Land virtually reads itself to you; all you have to do is listen." James Richardson "What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believea difficult artistic featthat poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctors office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are'Oh yes,' you think, 'that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart'" Tony Hoagland "There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously." Sydney Lea

Author Bio

Christian Barters first book of poems, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize, and his second collection, In Someone Elses House, was the winner of a 2014 Maine Literary Award. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, North American Review, The American Scholar, and other magazines, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The PBS Newshour, and The Writers Almanac. He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and he was a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is a supervisor of the trail crew at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Acadia.