{"title":"Barbara Hamby","description":"\u003cp\u003eBarbara Hamby (born in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a poet known for her exuberant, formally inventive work that ranges across popular culture, travel, art, and language itself, often employing elaborate extended vocabulary and comic energy. She is a professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Her collections include \u003cem\u003eBabel\u003c\/em\u003e (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), \u003cem\u003eAll-Night Lingo Tango\u003c\/em\u003e (Pittsburgh, 2009), and \u003cem\u003eBird Odyssey\u003c\/em\u003e (Pittsburgh, 2018). She has received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, an NEA Fellowship, and the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. With David Kirby, her husband, she has edited the anthology \u003cem\u003eSeriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else\u003c\/em\u003e (2010).\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"burn-poems","title":"Burn: Poems","description":"The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in \u003ci\u003eBurn\u003c\/i\u003e tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess--how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, \"How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn't. But I will.\"","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923299926058,"sku":"9780822967521","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/burn-poems-6245331.jpg?v=1767001632"},{"product_id":"babel","title":"Babel","description":"Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn poems such as \"Six, Sex, Say,\" she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife \"with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, \/ so linguistically adroit\" in \"Flesh, Bone, and Red,\" to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in \"Ode on My Mother's Handwriting.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and \"orangutans in the guise of men.\" As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems \"are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive.\"","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923299991594,"sku":"9780822958598","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/babel-6016776.jpg?v=1767001632"},{"product_id":"on-the-street-of-divine-love-new-and-selected-poems","title":"On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems","description":"Perhaps Paul Kareem Taylor said it best in his piece called On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby's American Odyssey: \"Reading Barbara Hamby's poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the world we inhabit.\"","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923300057130,"sku":"9780822962885","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/on-the-street-of-divine-love-new-and-selected-poems-9940526.jpg?v=1767001631"},{"product_id":"delirium","title":"Delirium","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 1994.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Barbara Hamby makes her poems out of jokes, Italian phrases, quotes from saints and philosophers, references to meals eaten and wines drunk. In a fluid, compelling voice, she sets a stage, peoples it with real and imagined characters, spins them into dizzying motion, and then makes everything disappear as with a wave of a conjurer's wand, leaving the reader to wonder, \"Did that happen, or did I dream it?\" One leaves her poetry the way one leaves a dark theater on a July afternoon, convinced that the ordinary passions really won't do--they need to be larger, as large as they are in these poems.","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923300122666,"sku":"9781574410037","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/delirium-5691037.jpg?v=1767001631"},{"product_id":"holoholo-poems","title":"Holoholo: Poems","description":"Holoholo is the Hawaiian word for walking out with no destination in mind. In the three sections of this book, Barbara Hamby walks out into the current American chaos with its inferno of wars, street violence, apocalyptic fantasies, and racial tension. Fueled by an American lingo that embraces slang, Yiddish, street talk, and the yearning to be able to describe her moment in time, these poems encompass the complicated past, difficult present, and unknown future. Every foray offers a glimpse of the world constructed from one woman's collage of consciousness. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eOde on My Nightingale \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMy nightingale is the conquistador of moonlight, \u003cbr\u003e the engine of divine hullabaloo, the dance party \u003cbr\u003eof shining headlights on a dark road past midnight, \u003cbr\u003e the thrill of that first kiss in the battered Chevette, \u003cbr\u003ethe wrong turn that made me burn my map, clap twice, \u003cbr\u003e summon my djinn. My nightingale is the stake \u003cbr\u003ein my heart that can't be dislodged, the hodge-podge \u003cbr\u003e of my brain at two a.m. when the drunks \u003cbr\u003ehave gone home or passed out in the street. My nightingale\u003cbr\u003e trills in the darkness, thinks of nothing \u003cbr\u003ebut his song, says forget me at your peril for I am \u003cbr\u003e the tiara of rain that falls from the purple sky, \u003cbr\u003ethe lies you tell yourself to wake up from your dreams, \u003cbr\u003e so listen, for my song will fade into nothing, \u003cbr\u003ebut nothing is made without me. I am the cosmologist\u003cbr\u003e of the atomic, high priest of everything \u003cbr\u003eyou never wanted to be, all your highjacked dreams, \u003cbr\u003e the screams in the muddle of night, the beam \u003cbr\u003eof starlight on the river of sleep, for we are alone, \u003cbr\u003e my darling, on this planet of night, and I am \u003cbr\u003eyour little god, your drinking water straight from the stream, \u003cbr\u003e for my song is spooling into the night forever\u003cbr\u003eand ever, amen. I am the derivative of sin. O let me in.","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923300188202,"sku":"9780822966586","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/holoholo-poems-8877761.jpg?v=1767001632"},{"product_id":"bird-odyssey","title":"Bird Odyssey","description":"Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in \u003ci\u003eBird Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e from Troy to Ithaka. The concatenation of images released include Elvis and Tolstoy cruising through the sky in a pink Cadillac, Homer and Robert Johnson discussing their art in the Underworld, and the women in \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e telling their side of the story, because what's a woman to do in this world of men? She has to strike out on her own, ask the right questions, and tell her own story, translating the world into her own bright lie.","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923300253738,"sku":"9780822965251","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/bird-odyssey-9089332.jpg?v=1767001627"},{"product_id":"all-night-lingo-tango","title":"All-Night Lingo Tango","description":"This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.","brand":"Barbara Hamby","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43923300319274,"sku":"9780822960171","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/all-night-lingo-tango-8937905.jpg?v=1767001627"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/barbara-hamby.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}