Asylum
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press
<p>Winner of the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize<p>2002 finalist in poetry, Society of Midland Authors<p>Quan Barry's stunning debut collection has been compared to Sylvia Plath's <I>Ariel</I> for the startling complexity of craft and the original sophisticated vision behind it. In these poems beauty is just as likely to be discovered on a radioactive atoll as in the existential questions raised by <I>The Matrix</I>.<p><I>Asylum</I> is a work concerned with giving voice to the displaced&#8212;both real and fictional. In "some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked" the piano player from <I>Casablanca</I> is fleshed out in ways the film didn't allow. Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Tituba of the Salem Witch Trials, and eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley also populate these poems.<p>Barry engages with the world&#8212;the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the legacy of the Vietnam war&#8212;but also tackles the broad meditative question of the individual's...