Born in Saigon, Vietnamese poet and novelist Quan Barry was raised on the north shore of Boston. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Barry is the author of the poetry collections Asylum (2001), Controvertibles (2004), Water Puppets (2011), and Loose Strife (2015). She also wrote the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born(2015). Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Missouri Review, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
In a review for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rigoberto González noted, “Quan Barry’s poetry outlines a sustained meditation on violence, though she has cultivated quite an expansive territory by locating violence not only in the timelines of personal and world history but also in representation, in literature and film. … She gives herself permission to participate in the narrative, admitting, in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, how obsessed she is with violence.”
Barry received an Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
In talking about poetry, she said: “Poetry is great for constructing narratives in a way that asks the reader to do some of the heavy lifting in putting the story together. The poet Louise Glück wrote an essay titled, ‘Disruption, Hesitation, Silence’ in which she talks about the power of the unsaid, of the ellipse; poetically, silence allows your reader to read into the silence, to infer.”
Craft [The first great poet]
by Quan Barry
The first great poet of
the crisis the one whose
generation was left as if
firebombed though if
you look back at the
seminal work you will
see that only a handful of
of the poems explicitly
touch on that dark time
the blood filling with
virulence and the night
always black and
spangled with stars says
when faced with
difficult material the
poet should begin
obliquely creeping in
from the edge a square
of light moving
imperceptibly across the
floor as the earth turns
and so I will tell you
that ever since I saw the
footage of the
journalists hiding in the
attic the rope ladder
pulled up after them
only the one with
foreign papers left to
stand her ground down
below the journalist at
first calmly sitting on
the couch but then
huddling in a cabinet as
the soldiers enter the
apartment next door,
the cries of the mother
floating through the
wall ib’ni ib’ni the
language ancient like
something whetted on
stone the way I image
language would have
sounded in the broken
mouth of King David
Absalom Absalom the
man-child hanging by
the shining black noose
of his own hair in the
fragrant woods of
Ephraim ib’ni ib’ni
next door the sound of
a body being dragged
from the apartment as
his mother wails
into the dark how
many mothers and how
many sons dragged out
into a night spangled
with stars where
everything is a metaphor
for virulence my son
my son and ever since I
saw a clip of the footage
the foreign journalist
managed to smuggle out
of the country images of
the journalist herself
hiding in a space meant
for buckets and rags as
next door the soldiers
drag away a young boy
please hear it again a
child of no more than
twelve his mother’s
lamentations forever
seared in the blood of
this thing I call my life
but really what is it
what is this light I hold
so dear it wants to move
imperceptibly across the
floor as the earth turns
so as not to become
too aware of itself?
