Quan Barry’s poetry outlines a sustained meditation on violence, though she has cultivated quite an expansive territory by locating violence not only in the timelines of personal and world history, but also in representation, in literature and film. These are poets whose literary careers I’ve been following over the years and whose work continues to engage me, not only because these are three voices from distinct ethnic communities, but because I’ve always appreciated the purpose and drive of their artistry. To test that theory, I’ve decided to write a retrospective of the bodies of work by three poets whose fourth books appear in 2015: Quan Barry, author of Loose Strife, Kyle Dargan, author of Honest Engine, and Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things. For poets, the third book usually covers that territory, though for the more prolific one, it’s the fourth that signals entry into what is known vaguely as “mid-career.” The expectation is that four published poetry books provides enough material to establish a reputation, a trajectory, and a sense of a poet’s vision. It’s not necessarily measured by a writer’s age, but by a writer’s publications and/or the span of writer’s participation in the field - at least one to two decades of professional life. IN THE LITERARY PROFESSION, the designation “mid-career” is open to interpretation.
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