“Susan Barba’s new collection of poetry, geode, out this month from the storied and now-Boston-based Black Sparrow Press, pulses with the blood of earth and stone. Through a lens of geography and geology, Barba looks at time, and our human efforts — sometimes futile, sometimes hopeful, sometimes cruel — to make sense of forces much larger and much older than our selves. It asks how we can understand eternity, and how we can be in gentle relation to this earth that we inhabit. In the collection’s incantatory centerpiece, about saving the Colorado River, she gives a catalog of species potentially endangered or displaced, repeating ‘stay with me now’ as the list goes on. Keep listening, she seems to urge, we’re all in this together. There is deep aural pleasure, too: ‘to find inside / a golden chip of spine, / a broken bit of brackish / rattlesnake: / scores of / tiny whelk, sharpened, bleached / and stillborn pencil tips.’ Although not a ‘dependent of the river, / nor a descendant’ she feels ‘still it is a relation / in feeling,’ a relation all of us can claim to certain hills or peaks or ponds or clouds. It’s a collection of solidity inside ‘immensity with speed bumps.’”

“Susan Barba’s second book, geode, is rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth, small delusions of ownership against wider backdrops of loss and time. Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember, create an intricate overlay of worlds, humans and trees.”

“With gorgeous incantations, with music that is as memorable as it is piercing, Susan Barba has given us the green-book, the earth-book, the book of justice, that shows us how endlessly, mindlessly “we are ticking away, all of us clocks.” geode maps our planet’s “blue-green grid”, shows us the earth itself, and our crime against it: “earth the story they’re breaking.” Not a story exactly, perhaps, but a spell, a book of spells. From the language of maps, from the language of the courtroom, from the language of the river, we are given one human’s testimony. And music, when it comes, is transformative: “Oak, whose girth / exceeds my reach / forever I am / at your feet, / looking up.”

“Tense and bright as a winter star, Susan Barba’s geode re-orients the senses around the sort of spiritual refreshment I thought we had relegated to nostalgia. Now, we need poems that help us survive our trouble and teach us not to lie – Barba’s brilliant “Letter to Gaia” is one of these, confronting us with love and despair in equal measure. Reading this book, we come to know again the lifespan of a river, the perishable joy of children, and the possibility of justice within the law. Geode schools us in what the poet might call “prodigal beauty,” delicate reminders in the natural world that life continues in the midst of disintegration. I am amazed and delighted by the energy the poet finds, a liveliness that survives hope and despair, a sense of being that cannot be owned or bought – she has found it, and in this book, she insists on giving it away. ”

“Susan Barba’s geode is a rich, lyrical mediation on earth and its generative forces as well as its vulnerability to human desecration, violence, and ignorance. Her poems navigate places where natural history, human imagination and man-made endeavor meet. Barba’s voice is necessary in this tragic American moment where reactionary forces are at war with science, reason, and the planet. ”

“Susan Barba creates an eerie mix of delicacy and terror. ‘How close they are to one another, / the garden, the fire pit, the dark groves,’ she writes, and they are close indeed in these poems that remember the genocide her Armenian grandfather barely survived, and honor the subtlest quiet details of daily life. Her poems are chalices.”