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Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and forthcoming in 2022, Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit,, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.
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Reviews
"Barrois/Dixon picks up the dropped and bloodied sword of these past authors and slashes off the shackles of (what we can assume is) a married name, bringing to witness the dead women of canonical prose, and all the while investigating the sprawling lyricism that is consciousness."
Bianca Stone, Brooklyn Rail
“Her directed and charged language is a reminder of how vital and vivid poetry can be.”
American Poet
“There are so many surprises in her work—the ideas, the imagery, the simple and imaginative use of language. Don’t get too relaxed, though, there are complexities in the Wier’s work that require one’s attention and thought, but the payoffs are well worth the efforts.”
ForeWord Reviews“Such poems are not whimsies but quizzical visions, or dreams, in which readers might try hard to get lost.”
Publishers Weekly
“Leave it to Wier to make her dead seem busier and more ebullient than my living...This anti-elegy, both reverent and funny, anticipates the funny reverence that Wier finds, makes up, and sustains throughout her decades of subsequent writing.
—Michael D. Snediker, Jacket
“Wier’s warm touch belies her procedural cunning and post-confessional derring-do, making her Selected Poems required reading for a new generation of poets...”
—Virginia Konchan, Boston Review
Reviews of books by Dara Wier
Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina
In the Still of the Night
You Good Thing
Selected Poems
Remnants of Hannah
Reverse Rapture
Hat on a Pond
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-"Why Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina" up at Action Spectacle
-"Ten Questions for Dara Barrois/Dixon" up at Poets & Writers
- Dara Wier’s page at the Poetry Foundation
Poems
- Two Poems (on Granta)
- “In Oval Mirrors We Cruise Through Touch-Me-Nots” (on The Dish)
- “Blue Oxen” (on Poets.org)
- “Hat on a Pond” (in the American Poetry Review)
- “Declining Public Appetite for Large Wars of Occupation” (in Boston Review)
- “Chinese Restaurant on Fire” (at Fou)
- “That Vagrant Mistral Vexing The Sun: A Far Cry” (in jubilat)
- Two poems (in Octopus Magazine)
- All poems on Verse Daily
- “Capitalism” (on iOPoetry)
Interviews
- Interview with Bianca Stone for the Ruth Stone Podcast
- Interview with Lesle Lewis for Rain Taxi Review
- Interview with Tiffany Troy for Heavy Feather Review
- The Ampersand Review, with Corey Zeller
- Her Kind, with Gillian Connelly
- Jacket Magazine, with Cynthia Arrieu-King
- Rob McLennan’s blog
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Audio
Dara Barrois/Dixon in conversation with Lauren Korn for The Write Question for Montana Public Radio: Dara Barrois/Dxion, Rebecca Wolff, and S. Yarberry reading at Deep Vellum Bookstore:
In the Kitchen Talking about Poetry & Process with Dara Barrois/Dixon
- Reading at Kelly Writers House
- Joe Milford hosts Dara Wier
Video
Reading with Gillian Conoley at the Emily Dickinson Museum for their May Phosphorescence Poetry Reading SeriesReading with James Tate at the Walker Art Center:
LaTanya Richardson Jackson reading the prefatory poem from In the Still of the Night
