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Winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry Barbara Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers.
About the author
Burn is
Barbara Hamby's eighth book of poems. Most recently she has published
Holoholo (2021),
Bird Odyssey (2018), and
On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014). In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai'i,
Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in
The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. Hamby lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Summary
Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable.
