“Confronting the life-altering psychological trauma the speaker’s husband has undergone after returning from military service, the speaker reckons with how to love and live in a marriage that is dissolving.”
“When a black woman poet refuses punctuation, she is refusing more than standard English. She is also refusing to allow the marks of history to (over)determine her writing.”
“The tension of a palinode comes from admitting a blindness that needs to be addressed—to expose the story of your old poem as a preconceived myth.”
. . . the collection is concerned with all kinds of disorientation–literal, figurative, physical, and spiritual–and the despair that comes with navigating unknown terrains.
The voices to which Barskova has turned her obsessive, greedy, undeceived attention in Air Raid are not easy voices to listen to, but they are voices she is rescuing even as her poetry . . . is rescuing her, line by line.
We talked about Bernadette Mayer, experimental writing, and courting uncertainty.
“No matter how far you stray, your origin beckons you.”
“The constant translations and riffs were my attempts to understand my father.”
