Tina Barr
from Deployed
At lunch, Shelby tells me
her mother died when she was twenty-one, father
gone. In the living room, a cop, her uncle, and
a lawyer, who slid a piece of paper across the
coffee table. She didn’t know what she’d signed.
Ten years later, she tracked down the officer
who’d been called to the house. I remember,
he said into the phone, she was murdered.
Shelby went to Memphis, but when he’d sat
down across a coffee, the cop denied it.
…
The poems in Pink Moon examine powerlessness over the body as well as in the environment. They explore the Western North Carolina area inhabited by the Cherokee, focusing on local inhabitants and lore, before reaching outward to other geographies: Egypt, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, in patterns of circularity and juxtaposition. Ranging over varying subjects: the Tuskegee experiment, the Ku Klux Klan, sexual and physical abuse, love both transgressive and domestic, familial patterns of incest and greed, Pink Moon uses the environment Tina Barr inhabits, and the virus that inhabits her own body, as bridges to the virus in the body politic. They illuminate the idea of contagion, positing the issues of race, and species extinction as an epidemic.
Pink Moon is the inaugural winner of the Jacar Press Editor’s Choice Award, selected by our Managing Editor, Natalie Eleanor Patterson, to an outstanding runner-up in the Jacar Press Chapbook or Full-Length Book Contests.
$17 – ISBN: 978-0-936481-55-5