Finalist for The Tupelo, Verse, Starrett & New Issues Poetry Prizes & The May Swenson Poetry Award
Thrift
Barbara Ungar spares no expense of style or emotion in these taut, charged poems that envision emotion and experience in startling new ways. Ungar pushes boundaries of technique but keeps the reader within her world; Thrift is a compelling reading experience.
“Barbara Ungar’s poems embody, with piercing authority, the ebullience of dissolution. She is a master of sudden pathos (see ‘Garment’ or ‘For the Town Clerk’) as well as joy pulled from ‘the used, the worn, the broken in’ (see ‘To My First Address’ or ‘The Thrift Shop of My Dreams’). Ungar’s formal panache offers abundant pleasures, and manages also to be wise.” —Frank Bidart
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Praise
“Multiplied by the power of myth and made wild by a fervent intellect, these poems are full of nocturnal musings, acerbic wit, thrilling leaps of metaphor, and an heart-felt sense of loss and redemption. From eulogies to farewells to meditations on the properties of light, Barbara Louise Ungar thrives in the gray areas between what we can’t spare, and what poetry demands as its price. These poems are worth every sacrifice, every time.” —Naton Leslie
“Music, daring, and a healthy sense of the absurd.” —Sibelan Forrester
Poems
“As in Dreams You Swim with Whales”
“Nonalogy”
“Formic”
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