Resurrection Pie

by John Wall Barger

A resurrection pie is defined as any dish made from yesterday’s leftovers—a meal that, in essence, rises from the dead. In this spirit, John Wall Barger’s new collection of poetry calls forth the past and its dead, describing a bardo-like psychic terrain in a language of fable and trauma. The poems move fast and a man arrives at his ex-lover’s island of secrets; a mourner coughs up red flower petals; a man walks backward across Philadelphia as bodies rise out of the ground; a boy watches his dead sister’s flea circus through a magnifying glass.

In language by turns vivid and destabilizing, Barger writes the odd, the marvelous, and the wounded with unguarded clarity. Resurrection Pie is a work of serious absurd, intimate, melancholic. Dispatches from inside the fever dream.

102 pages, Paperback

Published March 2, 2026

About the author

John Wall Barger (1969-) was born in New York City and grew up Nova Scotia, Canada. His poems and critical writing have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Zyzzyva, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry. He's the author of six books of poems, including Smog Mother (Palimpsest, 2022). A contract editor for Frontenac House, Barger lives in Vermont and teaches at Dartmouth College.