Thursday, January 12, 2012  What I'm Reading: Water Puppets by
Quan Barry  36º ~ 2 p.m. and just a nudge above freezing, low
tonight = 20º, we are lucky that it is only for one night and
the warmth returns soon, a brisk wind = wind chills, not
something we deal with often here  A decade ago, I was browsing
the poetry shelves at The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO, one of
the best independent bookstores in the country, when I came
across Quan Barry's first book Asylum.  It had a fantastic cover
and had won the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of
the top contests on my list.  I added it to the stack of books
growing on the floor at my feet and eventually cracked the spine
when I'd returned to my apartment in Fayetteville, AR, at the
conclusion of the trip.  As I read, I remember being transformed
and knowing I had found a new poet to love.  To my delight, the
book was actually assigned later in a grad school class.   In
2004, when Barry's second book came out, again from the
University of Pittsburgh Pre