Selected Poems

By Dara Barrios/Dixon (née Dara Wier)

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• A major retrospective that will stand as an indispensable record of turn-of-the-millennium poetry.
  
  Encompassing work from 1977 through 2006, Selected Poems reflects—while transcending—American poetry over the last thirty years, from early lyric poems to the complex enthrallment of poems in more recent volumes. Selected Poems confirms Dara Wier as one of contemporary poetry’s most important voices.

• Ups and downs, uneven passions and sometimes apparently random associations are the paradoxical constant in this first Selected from Wier (Remnants of Hannah), drawn (without new work) on eight published books of short poems... Such poems are not whimsies but quizzical visions, or dreams, in which readers might try hard to get lost.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Prepare to dig into these poems, read them twice, three times if necessary. That kind of commitment from the reader will pay off with poems resonating throughout the days to follow.
  Michael Lee, ForeWord Reviews
  
  [Wier’s] poems often move by accrual and accrue insights and ironies to reach moments of surprising knowledge and vision. Wier’s surreal is a clearer mirror than most straight-on descriptions or linear narrative... One can recognize the darkness here, just as we are grateful for Wier’s sentences, syntax, and words. Her directed and charged language is a reminder of how vital and vivid poetry can be.
  American Poet
  
  Wier’s use of repetition and variation and her attention to language itself suggests that one never steps in the same proverbial river, one never uses the same word, and therefore, one is never the same self... in denying a clear conclusion, [Wier’s poems] sustain possibilities and, by extension, sustain us as Wier’s poems sustain us...
  Jordan Sanderson, The Hollins Critic, Vol. XLVI, No. 4
  
  Lovechild of temple and cabinet of wonders, world-size Cornell box with moving parts and optional glass, Wier’s Selected Poems unsurprisingly grows stranger and lovelier the longer one lives in it.
  Michael Snediker, Jacket
  
  Much of [Wier’s] imagining involves physical sensation, tactility recalling the nineteenth-century rural English poet John Clare, to whom Wier pays tribute. 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--not only for its own abundance of merits, but also as a counterpoint to the swath of theory-driven, reader-alienating poetries that threaten to define, for better or for worse, this era.
  Virginia Konchan, Boston Review
  
  Wier’s poems have an eidetic quality of image; they pass through the mind like ghosts in drag, elegant and unexpected. They resist the nothingness of abstraction, even as they abstract.
  Malvern Books
  
  

• 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.