Join Brooklyn Poets for the launch of poet Rick Barot's collection of poems, Moving the Bones, on Saturday, November 9, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Victoria Chang and Brian Teare will open for Barot. Book signing to follow.
Closed captions will be available for the event through the Zoom livestream. For more information and to request additional accommodations, contact us at [email protected].
About Moving the Bones
"You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know," begins Rick Barot. What follows is an account of the rich and thorny valley between those poles. Moving the Bones dwells in liminal spaces—of love and memory, the pandemic’s singular domesticity, a serene cemetery of ancestral plots, dawn. In precise and tender verse, Barot captures the particularities of being in the middle of one’s life, reflecting on the joys and sorrows of the past and confronting the inevitabilities that lie ahead.
For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. “My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow / to understand what anything means,” he confides, “but understands that if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” Appreciating a Rembrandt, standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear—we encounter ephemeral murmurs of meaning everywhere, but only by slowing down, listening. If we take time to notice the enduring insights of daily moments, if we praise cherry blossoms, lungs, and crying, we might find it easier to bear the loss of a loved one, the sting of solitude, the body’s decline.
By laying bare his own experiences, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness. Patient and attentive, this collection illuminates the everyday and invites us to find pleasure in doing the same, at every stage of life.
About the Author
Rick Barot’s newest book of poems is Moving the Bones, published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. His previous collection, The Galleons, was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, the New Republic, the Adroit Journal and the New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
About the Opening Acts
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in Poetry. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), and the nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His most recent publications are a pair of book-length ekphrastic projects exploring queer abstraction, chronic illness, and collage: the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and the fall 2023 publication of Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. An Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.