A moving and sonically stunning exploration into the body and soul
David Barber’s masterful new book, NAKED, is powered by prolific feats of verbal prowess. With formal dexterity, nerve, and ingenious wordplay, these poems grapple with the serious business of soulmaking. In a spacious collection that enacts changes on the touch-and-go of innocence and experience, these poems are rife with inklings and reckonings in the name of muscle memory and mortal longing. Here, Hollywood meets Babylon in the Garden of Earthly Delights; Odysseus opts for a username; the naked eye goes toe-to-toe with the naked truth; American sonnets & ampersands run wild. NAKED is an all-out lovers’ quarrel over the give-and-take of the spirit and flesh—and Barber is all in.