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Rick Barot’s exquisite and subtle sensibility, like Keats’s, is led in equal measure by a tough intellect and an open heart. He follows his own prescription to “Tell each story cold,” and with a magician’s verve and aplomb, he makes language perform its most convincing tricks by pulling the handkerchief from what is otherwise “an empty fist,” by finding the “white nouns of the moon.” Barot’s Want is dexterous and thrilling, and his capacious and generous vision shows us how the eye survives "to correct the heart." —Michael Collier
After my first reading, I believed the image of a “marble nipple” embodied the sculpted intensity of Want. After a second reading, I decided the book's defining image was the carnality of a “puggish, miniature barbell pierced into a nipple.” By the fourth and fifth readings, I realized Barot was gliding easily between classic and romantic, formal and organic in his explorations of desire. But frankly, I've grown too intoxicated, too gripped by this wonderful collection to reduce it to a single idea. In Rick Barot’s hands every poem casts at least two luminous shadows. Want is masterfully merciless and merciful at the same time. —Terrance Hayes
In the five years since his first, prize-winning collection The Darker Fall, Rick Barot’s work has both deepened and expanded. His remarkable second book, Want, is concerned with the way seeing creates desire, and desire creates the world, and somehow, destroys it too: “By my attention the tired / hospital seemed to go down, the wrecking / ball round and avid as an eye.” An elegiac gravity suffuses, but luckily does not sink, the poems. Indeed, we watch the continuous creation, by human hand, of connections between worlds: “the white clothes / spinning in another dryer, like a magnolia / opening and destroying itself…” What we witness becomes us, in ways so intimate they might as well be physical: “There are things the body will / take into itself, things harbored and lost at once, / like water changed from ice to liquid to lost air. / He was lost into my mind. The story began there.” The restless eye of Want has a great deal to show us. Barot sees with justice, sobriety, and more often than not, pure ecstasy.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers. In 2001 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Stanford University, California College of the Arts, The George Washington University, and Lynchburg College. He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and at Pacific Lutheran University.
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