Shimmer
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Wendy Barker's new collection, Shimmer, sparkles with arabesques of image, deft swerves into insight. The two discrete series that make up this volume together comprise a meditation on mortality by focusing on the phenomenology of mourning, the "radiant" surface of things: a Chinese scroll the speaker deciphers; the heirloom (sometimes plated) silver she has inherited.These poems "gleam in the light" of Barker's lyric precision, and radiate powerfully with the "primal force" of an ancient female wisdom "within the earth," which Barker channels. Shimmer bewitches.
Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
Wendy Barker
Wendy Barker published fifteen collections of verse. Her poems appeared regularly in Poetry magazine, the Southern Review, and other literary journals. At the time of her death in 2023, she was poet-in-residence and the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
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