One Blackbird at a Time

Winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry,

selected by Alice Friman
Barker's poems capture what life is like on the other side of the English teacher's desk, how she reacts to her students' lives and their genuine if not always reverential responses to the literature she aspires to teach. Barker's poems are funny, frightening, moving, and playful (as shown by the title's reference to Wallace Stevens' famous poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."