Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras

David Gullette recommends
Bite Every Sorrow, poems by Barbara Ras: “Barbara Ras has written a dazzling first book of poems-C. K. Williams’s choice for this year’s Walt Whitman Award. She favors long, opulent, clever lines, as when she falls for a man in Central America: ‘I loved the gesture for wait, two hands pumping the air waist high / as if depressing invisible brakes, and the avocado man singing /
a-gua-ca-te all the way down the street. . . . Once he said, You watch for snakes while I sleep, / and laid his head on my belly and slept, / while cinders the size of bougainvillea petals arrived / from a burning across the valley.’ These poems, and this poet, catch us unawares.” (LSU)