Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina

By Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier)

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• With the same tender honesty found in all of Dara Barrois/Dixon’s (née Dara Wier) poetry, the poems in Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina are curious about the world we inhabit and the worlds we create. Barrois/Dixon brings profound attention to the things we love—be they animals, books, skyscapes, movies, poems, or other human beings—and to the stories that shape our worlds. Here, with emotional exactitude, is a collection of poems that is unafraid to express “love humor despair loving kindness love humor empathy/humor joy sympathy love kindness courage.” 
  
  Also available as an audiobook, read by the author.
  
  

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  Read Dara Barrois/Dixon's essay about Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina in Action Spectacle here.
  
  Dara Barrois/Dixon’s fourteenth full-length poetry collection, Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina, is a spectacular lyrical reflection on the power of language and how naming (and renaming) shapes reality. I think it’s no small thing that the author, (formerly known as Dara Wier), published this book under her new chosen name: Dara Barrois/Dixon....there’s proof of endurance and collaboration in the system of naming. A call and response, intelligently adjusted by a mind who feels the voices of authors and thier creations across time.
  Bianca Stone, Brooklyn Rail
  
  The poems in this collection examine power structures, as well as what is gained, given and taken through the process of literature, both as reader and practitioner, with ideas occasionally suggesting as proxy for living and being in the world.
  Rob McLennan, Periodicities
  
  This is a book to read, reread, and thereby be changed.
  Cathryn Hankla, Hollins Critic
  

• 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.