Exile

Anita Barrows' Exile is a series of 93 poems with a central female character whose mind and spirit we follow. It is not exactly a narrative, though we learn more and more about the woman's life as the series goes on. We learn she is an exile from some unnamed country, though the Middle East appears to be the main landscape. The poems are serious, dark, and mostly short. The woman is not only an exile; she has lost most everything that grounded her and is struggling to find herself; memories swirl around her, vivid imagery haunts her, her past, her present. This is a book of the maniacal insanity of war and how it seeps in and destroys the innocents, the non-combatants. It reminds me a little of the film Shame by Ingmar Bergman, except that here the woman does not capitulate. She is strangely and magnificently strong. And in the end, Barrows writes: Take off, take off your mantle of ashes. Sit now and taste the fruit. This is a beautiful and painful book. —Bill Mayer, poet and photographer, author of Articulate Matter While they appear first as haunting fragments of an uprooted life, there is wholeness to these poems as they compose, like pieces of mosaic, a widening reality of this world today. In the tides of the displaced and dispossessed—be they called refugees, migrants, asylum seekers—their inner experience is honored here with tact and restraint, unencumbered with political reportage or sentimentality. —Joanna Macy, author of Coming Back to Life