Colleen

by Colleen Louise Barry

Colleen Louise Barry’s debut collection of poems, Colleen, is a gleeful exercise in self-documentation. Without taking themselves too seriously, these often funny and wise poems ask big questions about the nature of reality. They mix mystery with candor and childlike wonder with aphoristic certainty.

Colleen’s clearest assertions invite our closest inspection, revealing infinite complexities. The ideas in this book are like cups at the end of rivers. Visual and abstract consumption is digested, but it’s also tangled. What is the poet’s role in her poetry?

Like a self-titled pop album, Colleen presents a mercurial version of its creator: powerfully refracted through each of her poems, aware of the absurdity inherent in her own construction, letting us in on the best inside jokes.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published April 12, 2022

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

TV
We are looking at ourselves in a really long mirror

We are having an experience about light

Light is not the opposite of dark

It doesn't mean anything

If you don't understand the why you are

Taken by all

You lost

You are living by building

A box within which to long

For what is outside the box

All that has meaning

Is not human but all that makes meaning

Does being

Immune to incentives make you

More or less human

If it is true that sometimes you love

The most what you hate must be that

You hate the most what you love

Come on now

Don't be so serious

Think about how you can

Know something so that it just keeps

Going outward and outward

I’ve come to understand so much

Less than I thought

Thinking not being

Synonymous with belief

I am interested in the world as if I am not

It as my interests create

If I could choose anything

I should choose myself

The sky goes everywhere

Are you a disciple of astrology

How can you tell where I am

I love a figurative concept

Look at how I look at stuff

Wanna sweep you off your feet

This is the part that makes you You

always want to leave

I create distance with my mind

Go ahead walk into the night

Touch my cheek because I cried

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a way Barry's poet, "Colleen," is artistically situated in the world. Or she's artistically centered. Or she's artistically obscured, at least from the world's perspective, because what is anyone to the world. The world is so huge. And present. It's assuredly gigantic. And the poet, "Colleen," contains those multitudes the world keeps presenting to her. She sees them. They make an impression, and then the poems are records of these impressions. Or they're assertions.

And stylistically the distinction between assertion and impression is one of my favorite things to read for in Barry's book. The poems are aware of the tiniest details around her. One of my favorite tiny details comes in the book's final poem, when two houseflies are dying somewhere on the edge of the city. How something like that should be upsetting the natural order, but, really, the natural order is kind of bigger than that. Or the natural order recognizes all the movements, and it's doing that shrugging emoji. "Hey, movements are part of the natural order." says the Natural Order. And this coincidence of movement and stasis and poet's recognition of everything in the world is the fine needle of poetic understanding present in the book. And what is the best syntax for presenting a fine needle like this?

Assertion? Impression? I would argue the book keeps presenting both. And the book keeps experimenting between the single poetic line as assertion-like. You know, how a sentence doesn't have to be a complete sentence but it can still feel like it was a complete sentence. And then put that complete-ish sentence on a line by itself, capitalize the first word of the line, and WHOA! Is that a complete sentence I see before my eyes? Or I feel in my chest? Maybe! But what about articulating an impression over multiple lines? Or what if the assertion comes up short of fully asserting itself? Or why am I constantly reading to hear completion and then finding myself so much more satisfied by a partial assertion blurring over to the next assertion, so it feels like a series of impressions? OMG. "Colleen!" I don't know want the book to make up its mind about assertion versus impression, if it's even in that tangle. I like swimming between the two!

Because that, for me, is the artistic situating of "Colleen." She's so Colleen, you know. The artist, Colleen absorbing the world, impressioning her reader with what she sees in the world!

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We have a responsibility to choose/ The thing that will destroy us” (8)

"Funny how the night moves/ You go through a hard time/ You emerge into life/ Nothing comes clean/ You came silent/ With your hand in my hair/ It makes me happy to know/ I have never been in love the way I think I have" (22-23)

"Life is about handling slow separation/ Mild shadows where the springtime knows/ The people on the road are love/ They act like it's no big deal" (31)

“The composition of the ideal is to be broken apart by feeling/ New meaning is not equivalent to new language/ Life is based on instinct/ Friendship is perfect/ All objects are exact/ Color favors joy” (48)

“Anonymity gets us through it is one take-away from morning/ All my enemies are valid/ Equally we are operating at a very low and very high level/ Get a method for accepting” (58)