Poetry. From one direction Ed Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES FOR JOE, from the other Joseph Torra's THE LETTERS TO ED, with gorgeous collages by Gian Lombardo, these poems literally collide on the page, encounter each other as the authors encounter each other's work and ideas in the poems themselves. Torra's LETTERS is a numbered series of prose poems that infuse daily life with a quiet and questioning desire to know. What were the four virtues of the true woman? What is duality of the text? A secured loan, title to property and large house close to the river reconcile community, family, emotional crisis and writing's role. Why do men do what they do outside the normal spleen? Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES range from lyrical to cynical, from verse to prose, bemused, musing, exploratory. Love/and an outdoor movie in daytime/would be different depending on how powerful/the projector is: either you could only/hear the sound without a picture,/a funny kind of unrelated story booming out,/surround

Watteau Sky: Letters to Ed/Practical Lullabies for Joe

Literature & Fiction

Torra, Joseph

Barrett, Ed

Poetry

Quale Press

Poetry. RUB OUT is a trilogy of experimental verse novels: "Rub Out," a meditation on Whitey Bulger and other Boston mobsters, Concord transcendentalists and the disappearance of a young woman; "Breezy Point," a lament set in New York City's seaside community of that name; and "Tell On You," a prose poem sequence focusing on boxing, Las Vegas comics and a corpse that washes ashore in Brooklyn.

Rub Out

Contemporary

Pressed Wafer

Poetry. Ed Barrett's KEVIN WHITE is a prose poem novel about four-term Boston mayor Kevin White, poet John Wieners, fugitive mobster and FBI informant Whitey Bulger, his brother and former president of the Massachusetts State Senate Billy, Whitey's girlfriend and mob hit victim Deborah Hussey, Virgil, Nomar Garciaparra, Catherine of Siena, Friedrich Hölderlin, Cardinal Law, Fanny Howe, a bank robber and the Virgin Mary. In its improbable chorale of assembled dramatis personae, this work is the story of making symphony out of cacophony, making relationships out of contingency, profaning the sacred, and sanctifying the mundane.

Kevin White

Poetry. Red Sox pitcher Dice-K Masukaza, an MBTA Transit copy from Belfast, the Irish mob in Southie, Fan Pier development, the Institute of Contemporary Art, fallen politician and radio talk-show host Tom Finneran, the poet John Wieners, Ralph Waldo "The Rifleman" Emerson and Deborah Hussey Thoreau, Boston School Committee member and anti-busing advocate Louise Day Hicks, State Senator Diane Wilkerson, the ever present (and ever absent) mobster and FBI informant Whitey Bulger: BOSSTON completes Ed Barrett's trilogy of Boston-based prose poem novels that includes RUB OUT and KEVIN WHITE.

Bosston

Pressed Wafer Press

Poetry. "Opening Ed Barrett's DOWN NEW UTRECHT AVENUE is like happening on a mint-condition, hitherto unknown set of chromolithograph baseball cards of an unimaginable rarity. Yes, but what do I do with them? You don't have to do anything, the 'unimaginable' takes care of that. Just sit and let them wash over you pleasantly but firmly, like 'a three-game series raveling and unraveling the hajj of things drifting through you'"—John Ashbery.

Down New Utrecht Avenue

The Leaves Are Something This Year: Selected and New Prose Poems 1994-2022

Poetry. Water is Ed Barrett's sign. John Ashbery's advice to readers about Barrett's last book DOWN NEW UTRECHT AVENUE is also on point for the poems in this book: "Just sit and let them wash over you, pleasantly and firmly." Few poets in America are in Barrett's class.

toward blue peninsula

Play Lucretius

Wet Cement Press

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Books by Barrett, Ed