Quan Barry

From the author of the widely acclaimed She Weeps Each Time You're Born comes a new novel, at once comic and moving. Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts (which in 1692 was Salem Village, site of the origins of the Salem Witch Trials), it follows the Danvers High field hockey team as they discover that the dark impulses of their Salem forebears may be the key to a winning season. In this tour de female force, the 1989 Danvers Falcons are on an unaccountable winning streak. In chapters dense with '80s iconography--from Heathers to Big Hair--Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective journeys of this enchanted team as they storm their way to the state championship. Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza, whose bleached blond Claw sees and knows all, the DHS Falcons prove to be as wily and original as their North of Boston ancestors, flaunting society's stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport.

We Ride Upon Sticks

From the acclaimed author of We Ride Upons Sticks--a luminous novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as a pair of estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama somewhere in the vast Mongolian landscape, the young monk Chuluun seeks the help of his identical twin, Mun, who was recognized as a reincarnation himself as a child, but has since renounced their once shared monastic life. Harking back to her vivid and magical first novel set in Vietnam, Quan Barry carries us across a landscape as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the stark Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khan. As their country stretches before them, questions of the immortal soul, along with more earthly matters of love, sex, and brotherhood, haunt the twins, who can hear each other's thoughts. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I'm Gone is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain faith and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, and a paean to Buddhist acceptance of what simply is.

When I'm Gone, Look for Me in the East

A young girl born under mysterious circumstances a few years before the reunification of Vietnam possesses the otherworldly ability to hear the voices of the dead.

She Weeps Each Time You're Born

Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize 2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors Quan Barry’s stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by The Matrix. Asylum is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced—both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from Casablanca is fleshed out in ways the film didn’t allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems. Barry engages with the world—the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war—but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual’s existence in relation to a higher truth, whether examining rituals or questioning, "Where is it written that we should want to be saved?" Ultimately, Asylum finds a haven by not looking away.

Asylum

The Unveiling

Winner of the 2010 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry In her third poetry collection, Quan Barry explores the universal image of war as evidenced in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as Vietnam, the country of her birth. In the long poem “meditations” Barry examines her own guilt in initially supporting the invasion of Iraq. Throughout the manuscript she investigates war and its aftermath by negotiating between geographically disparate landscapes—from the genocide in the Congo—to a series of pros poem “snapshots” of modern day Vietnam. Despite the gravity of war, Barry also turns her signature lyricism to other topics such as the beauty of Peru or the paintings of Ana Fernandez.

Water Puppets

Lisa Unger

Kevin Maloney

John Richards

Whitney Collins

Marian Crotty

Kate Brody

Issue 2

Volume 0

We Ride upon Sticks

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus' fifth-century B.C. trilogy “The Oresteia,” which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides,Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely “to loose battle” or “sow chaos,” a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

Loose Strife

Quan Barry embarks on discursive inquiry in Controvertibles. She lifts familiar cultural moments out of their usual settings and repositions them in front of new, disparate backdrops, endeavoring to understand the essence of modern experience. Doug Flutie's famous Hail Mary pass and Rutger Hauer's role in Blade Runner are contextualized within the Tibetan Book of the Dead, while an ultrasound reading acts as a meditation on the limits of critical theory. Samantha Smith, the Shroud of Turin, Igor Stravinsky, Bob Beamon's world-record-setting long jump, the largo from Handel's Xerxes, the resurrection of Lazarus, the Salem Witch Trials, and the groundbreaking 1984 Apple Computer Super Bowl commercial are just some of the people and objects Barry uses to explore the multifaceted nature of being.

Controvertibles

From the acclaimed author of We Ride Upon Sticks comes a luminous novel that moves across a windswept Mongolia, as estranged twin brothers make a journey of duty, conflict, and renewed understanding. Tasked with finding the reincarnation of a great lama—a spiritual teacher who may have been born anywhere in the vast Mongolian landscape—the young monk Chuluun sets out with his identical twin, Mun, who has rejected the monastic life they once shared. Their relationship will be tested on this journey through their homeland as each possesses the ability to hear the other’s thoughts. Proving once again that she is a writer of immense range and imagination, Quan Barry carries us across a terrain as unforgiving as it is beautiful and culturally varied, from the western Altai mountains to the eerie starkness of the Gobi Desert to the ancient capital of Chinggis Khaan. As their country stretches before them, questions of faith—along with more earthly matters of love and brotherhood—haunt the twins. Are our lives our own, or do we belong to something larger? When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East is a stunningly far-flung examination of our individual struggle to retain our convictions and discover meaning in a fast-changing world, as well as a meditation on accepting what simply is.

A Novel

In poems initially inspired by Aeschylus’ fifth-century trilogy “The Oresteia,” which chronicles the fall of the House of Atreides, Loose Strife investigates the classical sense of loose strife, namely “to loose battle” or “sow chaos,” a concept which is still very much with us more than twenty-five hundred years later.

Quan Barry

Books

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