Books

The Leaves Are Something This Year: New and Selected Prose Poems

September 15, 2023

The prose poems cover the extent of Barrett’s oeuvre and end with two new sequences—“Blow-in Addresses” and “Viking Renga”.

Book cover of The Leaves Are Something This Year — Edward Barrett, Quale Press, September 2023

From the publisher:

Over the course of Ed Barrett’s career he has manifested the prose poem as a vehicle to discover unselfconscious patterns of language and thought that arise in recurring patterns as fluid and pliant as stalks of kelp beneath where the Atlantic meets the shores of Ireland to patterns as sustaining as rebar in the structures of Boston’s Big Dig.

The prose poems cover the extent of Barrett’s oeuvre and end with two new sequences—“Blow-in Addresses” and “Viking Renga”. These pieces culminate in portraying a collaboration with one another, a kind of interrogation of the universe and a marveling at this tenuous, brief life we all occupy at this moment.

Written by

Ed Barrett

Edward Barrett (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, where his research, teaching, and publications focus on poetry and digital media.

Poetry books: Play Lucretius (2024); The Leaves Are Something This Year: New and Selected Prose Poems (2023); The Sinatra n (2016); Toward Blue Peninsula (2014); Down New Utrecht Avenue (2011); Bosston (2008); Kevin White (2007); Or Current Resident (2005); Rub Out —Three Verse Novels (2003); Sheepshead Bay (2001); Breezy Point (2000); Practical Lullabies for Joe (1999); Common Preludes (1994); The Leaves Are Something This Year (1992); Theory of Transportation (1990); and 7x3 (1987). Plays: Antigone (translated from the Greek; produced Off-Broadway, 1982). Opera libretto: Shaman (text translated from Navajo; premier, Manhattan Chamber Opera Company, NYC 1987). Digital Media books: Building Mobile Experiences (F. Bentley and E. Barrett, MIT Press, 2012); Contextual Media: Multimedia and Interpretation (MIT Press, 1995); Sociomedia (MIT Press, 1992); The Society of Text: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and the Social Construction of Information (MIT Press, 1989); and Text, ConText, and HyperText: Writing with and for the Computer (MIT Press, 1988). Textbooks: The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design (E. Barrett, D. Levinson, S. Lisanti, MIT Press, 2001) and The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing (L. Perelman, J. Paradis, and E. Barrett. McGraw-Hill, 1998).

Written by Ed Barrett

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