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Lois Baer Barr's Tracks: Poems on the "L" announces an exciting new voice. Her poems are attentive to the electrical details of urban life, which she observes on her journeys across Chicago's "L." From these details, Barr constructs a portrait of Chicago as it is today: a city marred by violence and by grotesque wealth; a city whose beauty is urgent and extraordinary for those who care to look at it closely. This is a poetry written in the public square and for it-a poetry that proposes, through the precision of its attention, to help us see each other more clearly.-Toby Altman, Author of Discipline Park
The movement of the train meets the movement of life in the poems of Lois Baer Barr's Poems on the "L", and we readers are Barr's fortunate passengers, carried through a range of Chicagoan experiences in fresh, thoughtful, and indeed poetic ways. These poems carry a sense of joy of the communal journey-and what it means to never stop being surprised by our time with others, as so beautifully summed up in words from the final poem of the collection "Fail Better II": I want to ride the "L" again- / share air space, delays, rattles / and hums. Sway with other riders. / A poetry petri dish, the "L" / is so full of people's stories, / you cannot fail to find one.-Andrea Witzke Slot, Author of The Ministry of Flowers (Valley Press) and To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press)
What a wonderful read!! Inventive, touching, funny, Tracks: Poems on the "L" is Lois Baer Barr's love letter to Chicago and to her life in late middle age. She takes us on a journey through physical and emotional landscapes with an empathy and expansiveness that leaves her readers changed, as she is changed by her encounters with the people she meets.-Ellen Birkett Morris, Author of LOST GIRLS
About the author
Lois Baer Barr was a volunteer for Open Books Chicago as a Reading Buddy at a school in Old Town when most of these poems were written. Author of a chapbook of fiction, Lope de Vega's Daughter, and of poetry, Biopoesis, Barr is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award. An emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, she has published critical essays, translations, poetry, and fiction in English and Spanish in journals and anthologies here and abroad. She lives in Riverwoods with her husband Lew. They like to hike and bike.
