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Moving the Bones
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.
“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.
- GenresPoetry
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First published October 15, 2024
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About the author
Rick Barot
9 books22 followersFrom rickbarot.com:
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012, 2016, and 2020.
Barot lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. The Galleons was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Also in 2020, his chapbook During the Pandemic was published by Albion Books. In Fall 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish his fifth book of poems, Moving the Bones.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry. In 2020, Barot received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012, 2016, and 2020.
Barot lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at PLU. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2020. The Galleons was listed on the top ten poetry books for 2020 by the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards, and was on the longlist for the National Book Award. Also in 2020, his chapbook During the Pandemic was published by Albion Books. In Fall 2024, Milkweed Editions will publish his fifth book of poems, Moving the Bones.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 9, 2024
I love the moves in this collection- the images as endings that require the reader to keep looking- “if you look at something long enough it will have something to say to you”. These poems are self-implicating, they turn outward, yet show so much honesty from the speaker. They’re interested in etymology and meaning - and the claims of wisdom make me feel after reading, slightly more human.
“Identity is what you can’t help but express over and over.”
“Of errands” “abundance” and “pleasure” really stand out.
“Identity is what you can’t help but express over and over.”
“Of errands” “abundance” and “pleasure” really stand out.
May 8, 2024
“we stood apart the mandated distance, like the / remaining pieces at the end of a game of chess.”
observational, tender, poignant meditations on many things, including a "during the pandemic" section that is really powerful.
observational, tender, poignant meditations on many things, including a "during the pandemic" section that is really powerful.
January 4, 2025
Gorgeous gorgeous! What a treat. I love poetry, and I REALLY love lying in bed and reading it out loud. This book was the first piece of literature I have read that was focused on the pandemic that I was not made queasy/upset by - thank God for poetry. I felt these poems massaging my memories of the feelings and sensations of moving through 2020 and it was beautiful.
January 13, 2025
This collection would be worth it for During the Pandemic alone -- I wrote notes all over that section because it felt like it was written for me. One of my favorite books of poetry I've read in a long time.
June 21, 2025
I was torn between 3 stars and 4, but ultimately decided on the latter because there are truly some shimmering poems in this collection.
In the middle of the book, there is a collection of 30 pandemic prose poems about the experience of isolation and its antipode. Surprisingly, I wasn’t put off from this collection. I, like many, am quite averse to pandemic related media still, so I was taken away by the poems that focused on such.
I picked up this book because of an interview in The Adroit Journal between Hua Xi (one of my fave poets) and Barot. Would highly recommend that interview too as it adds a lot of context to the themes and poetic forms within the book.
In the middle of the book, there is a collection of 30 pandemic prose poems about the experience of isolation and its antipode. Surprisingly, I wasn’t put off from this collection. I, like many, am quite averse to pandemic related media still, so I was taken away by the poems that focused on such.
I picked up this book because of an interview in The Adroit Journal between Hua Xi (one of my fave poets) and Barot. Would highly recommend that interview too as it adds a lot of context to the themes and poetic forms within the book.
January 1, 2025
Rick Barot’s poem *Moving the Bones* is a meditation on memory, family, and the passage of time. The work moves through a landscape of personal and collective history, where the past is not merely recalled but gathered, handled, and reconfigured, much like the bones that the speaker gathers from their ancestors. The theme is one of connection—connection to those who came before, to the bodies left behind, and to the histories that shape us. But it is also a poem about loss: the gradual disappearance of those histories, the inevitability of forgetting, and the shifting nature of home and identity.
The poem’s structure is loose, with a series of observations and reflections building on each other, almost in a chain of thought. The speaker moves through different sites of memory, both personal and communal, allowing the poem to take on a kind of sprawling, episodic quality. The lines are long, winding, and contemplative, creating a sense of a mind wandering through the past, collecting fragments and images. This structure, which mirrors the act of gathering bones, suggests an accumulation of memory over time—small, seemingly insignificant pieces coming together to form a larger, more complex whole. There’s a deliberate repetitiveness to the language, especially with the phrase “We hold the bones,” which serves as both a refrain and a meditation on the act of holding onto the past, even when that past feels like it’s slipping away.
The tone of the poem is one of quiet reverence but also of unease. The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of remembering and the paradox of memory itself—how it is both an act of preservation and an act of erasure. The imagery of bones—fragile, enduring, disjointed—captures this tension beautifully. At times, the poem feels like an elegy, a mourning for what has been lost, but there is also a kind of tenderness in the way the speaker interacts with the bones, as though they are not just relics of the dead but also conduits to understanding. In this way, Barot captures both the sorrow and the beauty of life’s impermanence. There’s something humbling in the act of gathering the bones, as if the speaker is trying to make sense of the chaos of history by offering it a shape.
There is also a strong undercurrent of displacement throughout the poem. The speaker contemplates what it means to come from a place or a family, to have roots in a particular soil. Yet, as the poem moves on, home becomes increasingly difficult to define. “Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar,” Barot writes, and the speaker begins to see home as a shifting concept—something not tied to one place or nation but to the relationships and memories that define us. This tension between belonging and alienation runs deep throughout *Moving the Bones*, where identity itself is in flux, always being redefined by memory, migration, and time.
At its core, *Moving the Bones* is about the act of remembering and the ways in which we try to preserve what is fading. The act of collecting bones, of gathering history, is both an attempt at connection and an acknowledgment of how much is beyond our reach. The bones are symbols of the past, of stories that have already begun to slip away, even as we hold on to them. The poem’s resolution is not one of closure but of acceptance: there will always be things we cannot remember, and yet we continue to gather the fragments, to tell the stories, to make sense of the bones.
Barot’s language is not ornate but measured and precise, capturing the stillness of the act of remembering. There is a tenderness in his observations, even when the images are stark or unsettling. The image of the mausoleum, “white as certain roses,” is a beautiful example of Barot’s ability to weave the natural world into his reflections on death and memory. These moments of beauty and clarity punctuate the poem, offering brief reprieves from the darker themes of loss and dislocation.
In its quiet complexity, *Moving the Bones* invites the reader to consider their own relationship to the past—the people and places that shaped them, the memories that linger, and those that fade. The poem offers no easy answers but instead allows us to sit with the questions, to hold the bones, and to wonder at the mystery of what has been and what will be.
The poem’s structure is loose, with a series of observations and reflections building on each other, almost in a chain of thought. The speaker moves through different sites of memory, both personal and communal, allowing the poem to take on a kind of sprawling, episodic quality. The lines are long, winding, and contemplative, creating a sense of a mind wandering through the past, collecting fragments and images. This structure, which mirrors the act of gathering bones, suggests an accumulation of memory over time—small, seemingly insignificant pieces coming together to form a larger, more complex whole. There’s a deliberate repetitiveness to the language, especially with the phrase “We hold the bones,” which serves as both a refrain and a meditation on the act of holding onto the past, even when that past feels like it’s slipping away.
The tone of the poem is one of quiet reverence but also of unease. The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of remembering and the paradox of memory itself—how it is both an act of preservation and an act of erasure. The imagery of bones—fragile, enduring, disjointed—captures this tension beautifully. At times, the poem feels like an elegy, a mourning for what has been lost, but there is also a kind of tenderness in the way the speaker interacts with the bones, as though they are not just relics of the dead but also conduits to understanding. In this way, Barot captures both the sorrow and the beauty of life’s impermanence. There’s something humbling in the act of gathering the bones, as if the speaker is trying to make sense of the chaos of history by offering it a shape.
There is also a strong undercurrent of displacement throughout the poem. The speaker contemplates what it means to come from a place or a family, to have roots in a particular soil. Yet, as the poem moves on, home becomes increasingly difficult to define. “Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar,” Barot writes, and the speaker begins to see home as a shifting concept—something not tied to one place or nation but to the relationships and memories that define us. This tension between belonging and alienation runs deep throughout *Moving the Bones*, where identity itself is in flux, always being redefined by memory, migration, and time.
At its core, *Moving the Bones* is about the act of remembering and the ways in which we try to preserve what is fading. The act of collecting bones, of gathering history, is both an attempt at connection and an acknowledgment of how much is beyond our reach. The bones are symbols of the past, of stories that have already begun to slip away, even as we hold on to them. The poem’s resolution is not one of closure but of acceptance: there will always be things we cannot remember, and yet we continue to gather the fragments, to tell the stories, to make sense of the bones.
Barot’s language is not ornate but measured and precise, capturing the stillness of the act of remembering. There is a tenderness in his observations, even when the images are stark or unsettling. The image of the mausoleum, “white as certain roses,” is a beautiful example of Barot’s ability to weave the natural world into his reflections on death and memory. These moments of beauty and clarity punctuate the poem, offering brief reprieves from the darker themes of loss and dislocation.
In its quiet complexity, *Moving the Bones* invites the reader to consider their own relationship to the past—the people and places that shaped them, the memories that linger, and those that fade. The poem offers no easy answers but instead allows us to sit with the questions, to hold the bones, and to wonder at the mystery of what has been and what will be.
January 29, 2025
4.5 stars
Really enjoyed this meditative, accessible collection. It has some of the best pandemic poetry I've read, gathered together in the 30-poem second section.
From "Pleasure":
From "6." in the "during the pandemic" series:
Really enjoyed this meditative, accessible collection. It has some of the best pandemic poetry I've read, gathered together in the 30-poem second section.
From "Pleasure":
My mind has a slow metabolism, it is slow
to understand what anything means,
but it understands that if you look at something
long enough, it will have something
to say to you.
From "6." in the "during the pandemic" series:
During the pandemic, I knew we were in a period of interval so
I considered what an interval meant. The interval we were in
was not like swinging in a hammock on a warm afternoon. It
was not like making a lesson plan to be taught. It was not even
like being inside a car wash and its cleansing tempest. It was
more like Lucky's speech in the middle of Beckett's play, its torrent
of rage and grief, after which the waiting, which was the point after
all, resumed.
January 26, 2025
Some beautiful heights including poem "The Lovers." Some less interesting works including the pandemic sequence.
April 6, 2025
"Maybe memory is the desperate pharaoh who commands that the things of this life go with him into the next."
September 1, 2025
#TheSealeyChallenge
October 24, 2025
a filipino author! rembrandt mentioned!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews