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Poems
by Catherine Barnett
The triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award.
Catherine Barnett's tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are "accursed," that are limited - and unanswered - by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us?
Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow - or at least measure - time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover's breaths; by remembering a father's space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.
"Starred Review. Elegantly Understated...Barnett claims that she'd "like to feel a little less, know a little more," but the emotional depth and observational nuance of these poems is something to behold." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Human Hours was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Catherine Barnett is the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced and The Game of Boxes. She has received a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.
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