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Philip Levine has written that Don Barkin’s work shows “wonderful skill.” This New & Selected more than bears out that assessment. Houses is both domestic and fierce, accessible and resonant, including many poems that have the audacity to follow traditional patterns of rhyme and meter. About Barkin’s earlier book of poems, That Dark Lake, Margaret Gibson wrote, “Don Barkin’s poems are memorable, unsettling, and welcome. They offer us ‘an ancient shadowed ache’ and a canny clarity; they offer straightforward honesty and deft, surprising turns of insight and image. That Dark Lake is a book that can touch the heart and evoke wry recognition in the same moment.” Donald Brown, writing in The New Haven Advocate, commented that “. . . there is a sense of mastery in the lines themselves, of getting the upper hand on one’s own dark side by thinking of all ‘that made you suddenly quietly glad / for what you’ll only just have had.’ ”
Don Barkin has published poems in Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, the North American Review, Harvard Magazine, The Louisville Review, Commonweal, and other journals. A full-length collection of his poems, That Dark Lake, published by Antrim House in 2009, was a finalist for the Connecticut Center for the Book’s poetry award. His two chapbooks, The Caretakers and The Persistent, have been published by Finishing Line Press, and he has twice been awarded artist grants by the State of Connecticut. A former newspaper reporter, he was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities. He has taught writing at Yale, Wesleyan, and Connecticut College, and now teaches school near New Haven, Connecticut, where he lives with his wife, Maggie, and his daughter, Eve.
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BOOK STATISTICS ISBN 978-1-943826-22-3 This book can be ordered from all bookstores, including Amazon.
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