Wings Press

• Bestsellers / Recent Prize Winners
• New Releases
• Whitebird Chapbook Series
• Complete Index
• Back List Guide
• Limited & Signed Editions
• Wholesale Information

• Authors Index
• Submission Information

• Home
• Company Background
• About Bryce Milligan
• Contact Information
• Premio Poesia Tejana Award

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Join Our Mail List

Recipient of the Austin Writers League 'Violet Crown Award For Poetry, September 2000, Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

Critical Praise for Way of Whiteness

• Poems of exquisite sorrow —and naked hilarious truth, love,and ecstasy.

  — Ruth Stone

• Poignant and exact, Wendy Barker's subtly nuanced and beautifully cadenced new collection ranges from the ceremonial "language of the country of love" to the wistful "upholstery of what might have been" as the poet herself moves toward increasingly radiant moments of discovery. Along this sometimes mystical "way of whiteness," Barker's own art gains in both stature and ambition. She can be wildly funny ("The Judgement: Aphrodite Speaks"), blissfully erotic ("Liquid Poem"), or cooly visionary (the title poem), but her work is always compelling in its clarity as well as in its seemingly effortless achievement. Way of Whiteness is a lovely achievement.

  — Sandra Gilbert

• The "miracle of sweet milk in coffee" that these poems offer makes even the hardest news -- and there is hard news here — and perhaps more important, restorative.

  — Alberto A. Rios

• The Bloomsbury ReviewJan/Feb 2001

  Reviewed by Jeff Biggers

  Wendy Barker's third collection of poems, Way of Whiteness, is a lyrical and at times playful muse on the ceremonies and annunciations that entangle our lives at home and abroad. From sampling food in Tuscany to overhearing lessons in French and chronicling the wisdom of her hairstylist, Barker's verses can be bitiingly sagacious, as when she excoriates herself in "Walking With You:"

  I don't know why I am trying to decide
  where the scent comes from.
  You have taken my hand.
  We are walking in the same direction.

  This struggle to question or question to death permeates the entire volume. In the poem, "At 50, Choosing New Make-Up," Barker declares,

  If I could decide on one of
  these shades, cover
  the red clusters, broken vesels of my face.
  I have found my breathing spaces.

  As part of a 50th birthday gift, "Swatches of fabric held to my face. / I am a 'Summer,' am told," to which she later wonders in the poem, "Color Analysis":

  To what season, then, am I linked,
  apparently forever, floating
  rootless on pale air? Am I simply
  to sway here on wisps of gray,
  pale cloud, a little gasp of pink,
  fading lavender as the sun's face sinks?

  Barker's fine sense of humor, droll and facetious, keeps these quandaries from being a disease of the personality. In the process, her poems range from the wise to the whimsical. In "The Judgment: Aphrodite Speaks," she provides a modern exposé on old Zeus to which Aphrodite chafes, "We could have made that mountain sing. I tried to make him happy with a woman of his own kind, mortal, but as you know, that backfired." Carrying Aphrodite's charge back to real life, Barker quietly mocks her lover's indifference in "Practicality, Foam, and Nighties":

  When a breast spills from a slipped strap,
  when we sink down under the sheets,
  sometimes I would like (wickedly) to whisper
  we are not being very practical.

  With these new collections (see Biggers on Pamela Uschuk), Uschuk and Barker mark themselves as two of the most insightful and spirited poets today.