One Hidden Stuff (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Barbara Ras’s first book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow, won the Walt Whitman Award in 1997 and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is currently the director of the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.

Beginning with a full moon and ending with "the petals/ of where we belong," this second collection takes on the clichés and mysteries of daily life—moving, loss, dogs, happiness—in hopes of finding what underlies them. Ras, whose debut, Bite Every Sorrow (1998), won the Whitman and Kate Tufts Discovery Awards, is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, approaching them mostly in a ragged, long-lined free verse that gathers steam as it moves down the page. Many of the small pleasures of these poems speed by like scenery in a train window. A speaker finds a seashell "the size of a large speck" and wonders about its ocean sound "and what kind of ear it would take to hear it." But the "small beauties" have little chance against larger historical forces, like a U.S. military campaign called "Operation Menu"; two cloud-gazing friends come across "the kind of billowings that could only be called atomic." Politics and the pain of familial relationships are often fused, as when a mother's thoughts about her daughter are juxtaposed with a front-page photo of a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Chechnya. While unlikely to turn many heads, this is an entertaining and at times very moving sophomore effort, which pays attention to life's small pleasures and subtle difficulties. (Oct.)
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