Take the long poem “reportage,” which works its way through five pages in quintains. She explores the job of the reporter observing the Congolese landscape in lines that remain without punctuation and switch from fragment to regenerated sentence in the same breath. The poem’s repetition balances between the systematic and an echoing monkish chant, a solemn song of reminder, a narrative that progresses and folds back on itself. Five stanzas in, Barry writes, “this is the journalist’s mission to carry the thing / back to us how the word derives from the Latin / for “gate” or “door” here the story he wants” (p. 11). Her urgency is in finding the language to reflect experience — her mission to not only find the words for gate or door, but to find those objects themselves, bring them to the reader, and find meaning within. The poem later confesses, “this isn’t a story of hope but rather of dormancy” (p. 13), the concept of which echoes throughout the collection.

Barry spends time in France and writes of it in the sprawling sixteen-page poem “meditations” at the center of the book that builds on the deeply penetrating topic of regret. Here we have a poem that contains citations as poetic line, and opens with two images on either side of the globe: the peaceful protestor at the side of a winter road in America and “In northwestern China / … a light-eyed woman yelling in the street” (p. 31). These two situations are slender, entwined glimpses in the lives of these passionate people, though neither message is revealed — yet. Barry moves to describe, “There are places on the human body that will not heal / due to their constantly being in motion.” This poem is full of that kind of worrying, the thumb on the wound trenchant and relentless — full of admissions, such as the description of the bombings of Afghan wedding parties with the speaker’s confession, “Either way I am always relieved / when I hear the bridge and groom are among the dead” (p. 35). Her urgency is in finding the language to reflect experience — her mission to not only find the words for gate or door, but to find those objects themselves, bring them to the reader, and find meaning within. Two pages later, she is asked “what I find most shocking about my seven months here,” and when she lists trivial things, she is chastened: “The someone gives a long speech, // the gist of which is that when someone asks you a serious question / you should give a serious answer” (p. 37). But this poem is full of serious answers: in a supermarket, she spots women in burkas and writes, “I admit I thought / a lot of ungenerous things. … // To refuse to imagine myself / choosing to live like that” (p. 38). By refusing herself the experience of shifting experience, the poet has, in fact, done so, becoming indignant: “Soon [France] will outlaw / a woman’s right to hide herself form head to toe” (p. 42). The sense of self within this poem and others is honest and haunted. The poem returns to the opening images, revealing a cardboard sign asking for “Peace” and “the woman with the light eyes just wants to know / where her husband and sons / have been taken” (p. 45). The poem does not stop there — we are returned to the devastating images of twin babies born after war, kept in formaldehyde in glass jars, but it is in those last four lines that give beauty to those battling contrasts: “In Mongolia there are singers / who can sing two notes at the same time. // One phrase deep and rich, ice moving downhill. The other / like birds flying. Like light dancing on a river” (p. 46).

Barry is referring to the practice of throat-singing, a kind of music that raises the hair on the listener’s arms. This, too, is the effect this unwavering collection has on the reader.