Cup of Home

Pat Barnes' delightful debut collection opens with I write slippery words, ruffle-edged, fern-fringed . . . I want words that terrify - saw-toothed, eerie, galumphing in the dark, words that taste like baklava and are just as fattening. And she delivers. Her poems convey earned wisdom, not only of the heart, but humanity itself. In "It is Love in Absencia, a succinct gem about profound loss she writes I smell his scent on a stranger and look for some new pain to save me from drowning in the old. From "Syrian Ashes," The grandmothers' language was lies, / but all the children spoke cinnamon. Many of her poems are graced with humor and wit but not without insightful subtext. She personifies her childhood house in conversation, The house said, I recognize your footsteps./ I said, you used to be bigger. In another poem she gifts an apathetic niece with a bottle of curiosity. I paid full price. Barnes collages a delightful quilt of art, music, family, food with a keen eye, traveling to places foreign and familiar. Cup of Home is a poetry collection you'll want to curl up with again and again.

Diane DeCillis, Strings Attached

With both humor and gravitas, Pat Barnes has mastered a multitude of poetic forms and technique while crafting an assemblage of life experiences. The poems in this collection are alive in observation. From shoelaces to Tarzan, groundhogs to fish funerals, cruise ships to the quiet moments of true loss, this is a collection that reads like a collage, shaped together with color and texture, like the red sari silk around her sorrows, music Singin' the Fat Blues, & images, yet focusing on the grace of the every-day. Barnes loves language, loves word-play & the music of language. I've not read poetry so proficient in the marriage of senses, where curiosity smelled like a promise, or one can nibble a Columbian rain forest. This collection is a work of art. So much invention here. So much fun.

Joy Gaines-Friedler, 2018 Forward Review Book Award Finalist

Pat Barnes writes with clarity and wit of the pleasures and pathos at the core of family life. Her poems speak with tenderness of her beloveds but also with humor and a sense of whimsy. Barnes gives us the gift of balance - sadness and joy - in these deeply felt and accomplished poems.

Mary Jo Firth-Gillett, Soluble Fish

Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, First Book Award