Interview with Barbara Claire Freeman at Studio One Reading Series.
From Feminist Review:
These poems’ heterogeneous forms suggest that poems, too, are artifacts to be referenced in other pages. The denser, longer ones move in cadences and sentence fragments that recall Lyn Hejinian; the sudden spaces and surprising inversions of the narrower ones gasp elegiacally around the textbook-ready rhetorical platitudes they try to dismantle. All of them shudder at the brutality of infrastructure (“Most of the ideas we’re talking about are bridges and roads”), the permanence of debt (“America will not let/her children deleverage”), the complicity of the poet and the caprice of communication. [full review]
"This is an extraordinary collection of poems by Barbara Claire Freeman. The poems range in form syle, but they are participate in an austerity, a political edge, and what one poem calls 'abbreviated violence' Beautifully crafted, tight, with no word to spare, these poems interrogate the region of what is left in the aftermath of devastated land and life. Fragments and figures emerge not in the service of redemption, even temporary, but to offer shards of a region more pure than grief. There is light, color, the missing of what is long gone, and there are slaves who speak, orphans for whom loss has become landscape itself. The syllables somehow stand, though, insistent scraps of language pushed beyond the possibility of narrative sequence by forms of destruction. And it is finally rare to find such economical and punctuated poetic form working the terrain of political devastation and with such sharp effect. Perhaps the poetic equivalent of Coetzee, Freeman's poems circulate Big Oil, slavery, uncertain homelands, property and lost land and kin within a form that never stops marking the unspeakable."
—Judith Butler
"Barbara Claire Freeman's poems lurch, zoom, reverse, and careen with preternatural excitability, verve, and sense of purpose. Hers is a poetry held together by enormous will and rhetoric, by an impeccable attentiveness to structural regularity and soundness as a necessary counterpoint to the maelstrom of the mind attempting to come to terms with the calamaties and injustices of history, of our own time, and those which would appear to be part and parcel of our being born to begin with. Freeman's poetry carries with it the hope that we might restore to sense what experience's avalanche undoes if only we work hard enough, pay attention, find the right way to put what needs putting right. If we can work our great disarray—personal, political, existential—into some responsible linguistic shape, then maybe that labor will lead, however provisionally, to another kind of order. This is the task of a lifetime, to be sure. Yet at times Freeman's poems suggest that this aspiration is closer to wishful thinking, a goal we can never expect to realize. They entertain, half-tragically, the possibility of such restoration only for as long as the sentence that proposes it-and then they stop. This is beautiful, ravishing, dangerous work."
—Timothy B. Donnelly
