Books
A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers, Eds. Julie Brooks Barbour and Mary Biddinger (The University of Akron Press, 2024)
Praise:
The essays of A Mollusk Without a Shell emphasize the care of the creative mind and body. Poets tend to create their own practice; these essays don’t dictate to poets what they should do for self-care, but rather provide alternative routes to consider, certain actions or outlooks to pay attention to while tending to their creative lives. This well-organized collection of essays is a love letter to poets, a guide for the care of the actual writer behind the pages.
-Gale Marie Thompson
Read more about this book at The University of Akron Press website
Praise:
The essays of A Mollusk Without a Shell emphasize the care of the creative mind and body. Poets tend to create their own practice; these essays don’t dictate to poets what they should do for self-care, but rather provide alternative routes to consider, certain actions or outlooks to pay attention to while tending to their creative lives. This well-organized collection of essays is a love letter to poets, a guide for the care of the actual writer behind the pages.
-Gale Marie Thompson
Read more about this book at The University of Akron Press website
Haunted City (Kelsay Books, 2017)
Read a review of Haunted City at Escape into Life.
Katie Manning reviews Haunted City at Poetry Rev.
Read a poem from the collection at Verse Daily.
Praise:
Julie Brooks Barbour’s exciting new book, Haunted City, occupies the edge between poetry and fable, dream and nightmare. These vivid prose poems, themselves between genres, construct a terrifying metropolis of desire.
-Stuart Dischell, author of Backwards Days and Dig Safe
This book of prose poems, or perhaps it is a short novel with poetic lines backlit by lightning, is mysterious and involving, indeed haunting. Barbour is a true poet with a muse at her side. As she explains, what she has created is “really what someone else created when I relinquished control.”
-Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems
Presented in brief glimpses of lyric prose, an extended sequence of image-driven evocations, Barbour gives us experimental writing at its very best, offering innovations in form and technique that are thought-provoking as they are charged with affect and suspense. This is an accomplished book by a truly remarkable writer.
-Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014
Read a review of Haunted City at Escape into Life.
Katie Manning reviews Haunted City at Poetry Rev.
Read a poem from the collection at Verse Daily.
Praise:
Julie Brooks Barbour’s exciting new book, Haunted City, occupies the edge between poetry and fable, dream and nightmare. These vivid prose poems, themselves between genres, construct a terrifying metropolis of desire.
-Stuart Dischell, author of Backwards Days and Dig Safe
This book of prose poems, or perhaps it is a short novel with poetic lines backlit by lightning, is mysterious and involving, indeed haunting. Barbour is a true poet with a muse at her side. As she explains, what she has created is “really what someone else created when I relinquished control.”
-Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems
Presented in brief glimpses of lyric prose, an extended sequence of image-driven evocations, Barbour gives us experimental writing at its very best, offering innovations in form and technique that are thought-provoking as they are charged with affect and suspense. This is an accomplished book by a truly remarkable writer.
-Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014
Small Chimes (Kelsay Books, 2014)
Praise:
Small Chimes, the title of Julie Brooks Barbour’s beautifully wistful poetry collection, reveals something of her subject matter and of her artistic approach as well. She is alert to the furtive moment, the subdued gesture, the understated, even the unstated, drama.
- Fred Chappell
Barbour writes with a voice as intimate and focused as a mother singing to her child. These poems leave you breathless inside their pastoral landscapes and interiors, ringing resonant chimes. In unaffected, simple language, she traces the domestic whitewater of family life, both in the roles of mother and child.
- Rachel Dacus
Early in this rich first full-length collection, Julie Brooks Barbour writes "I wanted to know their lives in full, / not in fragments." She explores those lives, and most particularly, the new life of her child, through lines that are crisp and sharp, that feel both highly polished and emotionally explosive.
- Keith Taylor