Loose Strife

Saigon-born, Boston-raised Barry's fourth collection (after the Donald Hall Prize-winning Water Puppets) contains poems that were inspired by a 2012 gallery exhibition mounted collaboratively by Barry and visual artist Michael Velliquette and are ultimately rooted in Aeschylus'sOresteia. The book's title, also the name of many of the poems, with identifying phrases added, is used in "the classical sense of loosing battle, sowing chaos, which the last twenty-five hundred years have done nothing to diminish," as Barry says in a poem that like many here derives its particular energy from the spaced wording. "How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell?" Barry asks plaintively in the opening poem. But that's the poet's job, and she does it well, urgently leading us from the sacrifice of Iphigenia ("part for the whole") to a black man stabbed with an American flag on Independence Day, July 1978 ("a city's worth of/ people pouring/ around him") to Cambodia's Killing Fields ("children whose parents/ were killed so that they would be left alone in the world/ to do the grisly work that precedes paradise").