ISBN 9781733408257

Colleen Louise Barry’s debut collection of poems, Colleen, is a gleeful exercise in self-documentation. Without taking themselves too seriously, these often funny and wise poems ask big questions about the nature of reality. They mix mystery with candor and childlike wonder with aphoristic certainty.

Colleen’s clearest assertions invite our closest inspection, revealing infinite complexities. The ideas in this book are like cups at the end of rivers. Visual and abstract consumption is digested, but it’s also tangled. What is the poet’s role in her poetry?

Like a self-titled pop album, Colleen presents a mercurial version of its creator: powerfully refracted through each of her poems, aware of the absurdity inherent in her own construction, letting us in on the best inside jokes.

Colleen Louise Barry is an artist and writer. She runs the interdisciplinary publishing projects Mount Analogue and Angel Tears and teaches visual art at Westside Middle School in Seattle, WA. www.colleenlouisebarry.com

“Like Rihanna, Madonna, and other mononymous projects preceding it, Colleen uses the power of its author’s name to house a limitless artistic universe. With confidence both cautionary and philosophic, Barry thwarts the reliability of time, douses the commodification of art in smokey uncertainty, and mirrors reality off the warped traversals of the wind. ‘It’s brave to have a name and to use it,’ she tells us; even in Colleen’s stillest moments, Barry’s hot pink reflections glimmer, like a disco ball in a sequined room.”
—Sadie Dupuis, Speedy Ortiz and author of Mouthguard

“‘Into the air I burn,’ writes Barry in her stylish and embodied collection, Colleen. This book is fervent, hungry, loving, and strong—it lights up the room. It is a joy—deep and pristine—to travel with Colleen’s speakers and creatures through life’s ruts and regular pleasures, to ‘watch a curious fly / Taste its way down the grid.’ Barry’s attention to paradox (‘Awful Bliss’), to relation, reflection, correspondence—this is that and that is this, isn’t it?—dances on every page: ‘Living becomes an art,’ and we’re so lucky, here, to be ‘learning / everything at once.’”
—Emily Hunt, author of Dark Green and Company

“Finally, a thrillingly self-aware poetry book written by someone you want to hang out with. It was about time for a new cool poetry lady in the style of Mina Loy with her shoulder-grazing earrings and Frank O’Hara with his decorated friends and fast talk. Not since Chelsea Minnis’ iconic Poemland have I felt so immersed in clever Ars Poetica and a believable world where lyric and place fuse with purpose—to provoke thought and delight. Colleen Louise Barry invites me, a jaded poetry reader, ‘anyone can try to look at this / it’s approachable as weather,’ and I rise to the pleasurable, long-overdue occasion.”
—Monica McClure, author of Tender Data

“Colleen is moving, iconic, and beautiful. It is a journey through the melting, strange landscapes of late capitalist America. It is also a quest for love and glamour in spite of it all. This book makes me want to live. I love it.”
—Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

“Just do what comes naturally, start with Colleen’s first poem that goes, ‘I can feel the wind but it can’t feel me // The tiny white trumpet / flowers tremble to show the shape // The wind moves them but it can’t move me.’ If you wonder, you can see, this book Colleen comes concerned with cause and effect, for one thing. There is also this matter: ‘Imagine being the tree next to the last tree.’ With Colleen comes many matters, small, large, visible, invisible, tragic, not, awesome, most often, consequential, always. Colleen makes me want to live a carefully chosen symbolic afterlife and a life without reaching for symbols. Colleen gives me a chance to see myself as someone else. Colleen says here, you can have it. Colleen gives us carrots, key, nipples in the sun, box fans, shrimp and flip flops. Poetry, smartest and kindest of all, gives Colleen a place to be Colleen and invites you, maybe a stranger, in, to be whatever you want to be. Thank you, Colleen.”
—Dara Weir, author of Reverse Rapture, YOU GOOD THING, and Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina