Jennifer Barber's new collection, The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, came out in the spring of 2022 from The Word Works and her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Ibbetson Street, and upstreet. Her previous books are Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. She is the current poet laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts, and the co-editor, with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum, of the anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). The founding editor of the literary journal Salamander, she served as its editor in chief from 1992 to 2018.

Other poems by Jennifer Barber in Verse Daily:
February 27, 2007:   "Reinante" "Dust of wheat..."

Books by Jennifer Barber:

Other poems on the web by Jennifer Barber:
Four poems
Two poems
Four poems
Two poems
"Autumn Melody"

Jennifer Barber's Website.

Jennifer Barber on Twitter.

About The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made:

"'No one's being watched/though watchfulness remains' in Barber's most accomplished collection, because an intimate watchfulness births these exquisite poems. Their omniscient power blazons any corner of consciousness so that 'A tree rubs a cloud between its fingers,' 'a seedpod answers a questionnaire,' a creation myth breathes anew, and a museum goer's intent gaze at a painting's three oranges causes them to 'glow like coals in you.' Her elegant, steely, and elegiac prowess brings to the present a 1412 Spanish court order to segregate the Jews from the Christians as well as a memory of her daughter--at present heading out to her boyfriend's--as a toddler first standing 'at the center of the world.' Ultimately watchful of love's relationship to both loss and beauty, Barber's concomitant revelations remain aglow in us."
—Jessica Greenbaum

"In THE SLIDING BOAT OUR BODIES MADE, we see the ecology of compassion and hopefulness, a fragile latticework made of the concern for how all things might fall away in a world seeming to be too full of loss. With a meticulousness like the Zen of poets in ancient China, Barber takes us to a place where we can believe there will always be a chance to breathe, even as we feel the terror of life in the beauty of its most minute details. These are finely crafted poems with turns on the torso of history and the times in which we live as if those things are a single tree of life, and they are. Barber teaches us how to know subtlety, how it can bring a fullness to us, a light without limits."
—Afaa M. Weaver