Water Puppets

Readers of Barry's two previous books, Asylum and Controvertibles, will recognize the signature weave of her work: the cross-hatching of world events, multicultural perspective, and autobiographical detail into sharply rendered yet fluid reflections on the impossibility of living a "guilt-free life" within the scarred moral topography of human history. Less uniform in execution than 2004's Controvertibles, the poems in this book (whose title references Vietnam's ancient art of aquatic puppet theater) span a variety of forms from short lyric to lengthy narrative, showcasing Barry's photographic eye for despair both collective (Congolese refugees "sifting down a broken road...many of them/ with the agony gouged into their bodies") and solitary ("One man standing in the slushy winter light, torso twisting/ like a weathervane as he holds/ a cardboard sign high in the air").