Handmade Paper
New Rivers Press: Winner of The 1994 Minnesota Voices Project Competition
Praise
“Barone’s poems line up like so many photos in an album. She invents for a s one invents with a camera, experimenting with the continuity of character in different exposures to language. Her portraits develop a lasting effect.”
—Diane Glancy, author of Iron Woman and Trigger Dance
“The rich details of everyday life abound in this fine book, like flecks of color in handmade paper. Her poems often weave together the unlikely, making connections which help us see with new eyes the old stories.”
—Jill Breckenridge, author of How to Be Lucky
“This prize volume from the Minnesota Voices Project is a first collection of poems by a Wisconsin-born novelist/painter/printmaker now resident in Minnesota. The first section is a gathering of 13 lively poems about the author’s childhood and youth, her Irish and German relatives in the Horicon Marsh area of eastern Wisconsin, near Appleton. The second section, a long poem entitled ‘Writing on Handmade Paper’ is ambitious but, in the end, less successful than others—mainly because of the poet’s strenuous efforts to be ‘experimental.’ Much better is the section ‘Portraits of Women,’ where Barone’s own career as a graphic artist gives authenticity to her poems on paintings by Pissarro, Degas, Turner and herself. The book’s final section contains poems in a calmer, more prosaic vein—poems that stem from motherhood, life in a big city, and work as a nurse in a nursing home. Many of these are about the lost and lonely of the world, depicted with tenderness but free of sentimentality. Readers, keep your eye on this talented Upper Midwest poet.
—Fred Eckman, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
