Barbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction (University of California Press), among many other works of literary theory and criticism. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing and poetics in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Incivilities, her first collection of poems, was published by Counterpath Press in 2009; a chapbook, St. Ursula's Silence, was published by Instance Press in 2010. Selections from these collections won the Boston Review/Discovery Prize and the Campbell Corner Prize (Sarah Lawrence College). A second chapbook, #343, was published by Chapvelope Press in 2014. Every Day But Tuesday, a second collection of poems, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Press in 2015. Work from this collection has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Agriculture Reader, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, Jacket 1, Lana Turner, Laurel Review, The Offending Adam, The Volta, Seattle Review, Volt, Washington Square, and Wave Composition, among others.

Books by Barbara Claire Freeman:

Other poems on the web by Barbara Claire Freeman:
"The Second Inaugural"

About Every Day But Tuesday:

"Every Day But Tuesday offers the intricate suggestiveness of Symboliste poetry in the straightforward musical language of objectivists like Lorine Neidecker. Here the actual object is the material force that allows us to feel the weight of a fluid world finding complex substance through mobilizing all the resources of grammar. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Freeman treats both sonic effects and grammatical complexities as the basic personages in her poems. The result is a sensual volubility that treats as a cause of satisfaction the realization that objects cannot appease the hungers of mind."
—Charles Altieri

"Opening with a 'closed' 'way' (or a way closed in hearsay), and proceeding to look, unceasingly, for a 'truer way,' Barbara Claire Freeman's new collection is restless but also at ease in its quest. The spacious and lovely lyrics of Every Day But Tuesday beautifully describe an ongoing, transformative, journey—where every end point is also a beginning, and the before of what might not ever happen dissolves into the after of what 'hasn't yet occurred.' This is a book by one who, as Bishop put it, would rather have the iceberg than the ship, or, one who would likely trade either apparent stability for the waves—for Freeman is one of Ashbery's best heirs, someone who finds her own way into the in-between spaces opened by affect's tendency to roam (it's not just chance that the book keeps returning to the image of a voyage). Here abstract idea becomes concrete image and vice versa, in quicksilver ways that remind us of how transitory the real is and how oddly, gorgeously durable perception can be: 'moments flashing, gathered stones.'"
—Laura Mullen

"Barbara Claire Freeman's new book is unlike anything I've come across, trading as it does in beauty and loss, fragility and survival, the here-for-now and the soon-to-be-gone. Like 'a song in the form of a question,' the question here is stretched to fit the form of a book, with prosody that's as cutting as it is conversational, intimate as it is otherworldly. 'If the moon wakes them they will be happy / I was at the summit, I was alone.' And lucky for us, we get to climb to that summit, with Freeman's gorgeous work. Every Day But Tuesday got its hooks into me early, and I took from it slowly, trying not to find its end."
—Joshua Marie Wilkinson