Bye-Bye Land

Christian Barter’s first book of poems, The Singers I Prefer, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize, and his second collection, In Someone Else’s House, was the winner of a 2014 Maine Literary Award. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, North American Review, The American Scholar, and other magazines, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The PBS Newshour, and The Writer’s Almanac. He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, and he was a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. He is a supervisor of the trail crew at Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he is currently serving as Poet Laureate of Acadia.

• Table of ContentsPart 1: The Warm Land Part 2: The Meaning of Being Numerous Part 3: And All the Lives to BePart 4: Secret EvidencePart 5: The Print of the Nails or The Rest Is Silence

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award"Christian Barter's brilliant song of ourselves is Walt Whitman filtered through The Waste Land. Bold and broken-hearted and up-to-the-minute, it is a visionary elegy for America in dozens of dead-on voices you hear every day on the train, in the halls, across the breakfast table. Bye-Bye Land virtually reads itself to you; all you have to do is listen."—James Richardson"What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believe—a difficult artistic feat—that poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctor’s office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are—'Oh yes,' you think, 'that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart—'"—Tony Hoagland"There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously."—Sydney Lea