Friday, October 17, 2014

This Book Will Change Your Life - Here Comes The New Joy by the John W. Barrios.

The John W. Barrios is ephemera and love, and while biased we are, in so many ways, to read Here Comes The New Joy is to know the pain, and yes, joy of its author, someone we call friend, even if in fact we've never met in person, shared a cup of coffee, or had any actual contact that might otherwise constitute connection. That the Barrios' opening essay The Quick And Sick Of Life, in what is otherwise a poetry collection, will break your heart in 10,000 ways is a given. That we will be drawn to that which is more prose than poem, take The First Time I Lied for example - though do note our most subjective bias, as this lovely, haunting, terrible piece appeared in Daddy Cool - or The Stuffed Version Of Himself, is also mostly always a given, does not minimize the head-butting power of The Poet At The Podium or New Mexico, 1970-Something, much less the fragmented poems that litter both the landscape of Here Comes The New Joy, and what we assume is Barrios' psyche laid-bare for our consumption. Because they are all of a piece, life and its odd mixture of joy and pain, and pain and joy, and how it all becomes mashed together. At least for Barrios there are words, intricate and blown-up, a gift not all have at their disposable when it comes to their need to escape their own vulnerable brains, much less change their life.

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