Rick Barot

A vulnerable and honest collection of poems exploring lineage, love, and the pandemic, from one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation.“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.

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Award A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020 For almost twenty years, Rick Barot has been writing some of the most stunningly crafted lyric poems in America, paying careful, Rilkean attention to the layered world that surrounds us. In The Galleons, he widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism. These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the departure and destination points of dozens of galleons between 1564 and 1815, these ships evoking both the vast movements of history and the individual journeys of those borne along by their tides. “Her story is a part of something larger, it is a part / of history,” Barot writes of his grandmother. “No, her story is an illumination // of history, a matchstick lit in the black seam of time.” With nods toward Barot’s poetic predecessors—from Frank O’Hara to John Donne—The Galleons represents an exciting extension and expansion of this virtuosic poet’s work, marrying “reckless” ambition and crafted “composure,” in which we repeatedly find the speaker standing and breathing before the world, “incredible and true.”

That art should once have been markedwith this delicacy: always only oneof each thing made, so that your poemhas its one life on the sheetyou have chosen for it, or the snapshotof the birthday party, everythingin the room upended by the children'sjubilation, survives onlyin the single defended piece of glass. Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of The Darker Fall and Want and teaches at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

“Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives ‘to correct the heart.’”—Michael Collier “In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time.”—Terrance Hayes

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. "Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly "This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

Winner of the 2001 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. "Barot’s mature linguistic skills really come down to a metaphorical and musical intelligence that refuses to value one element over another, that will not let the language or the longing take over."—From the Foreword by Stanley Plumly "This is a book of lyric wonders: wit that turns dark, darkness that blazes up again in music and story."—Eavan Boland Rick Barot is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. He was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry.