© 2015 by Rick Barot
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:
Managing Editor
Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barot, Rick, 1969–
[Poems. Selections]
Chord / Rick Barot. — First edition.
pages ; cm.
ISBN 978-1-941411-03-2 (softcover : acid-free paper)
I. Title.
PS3602.A835A6 2015
811'.6—dc23
2014032732
Cover image: “Landscape #7” by Vanessa Marsh. Pigment print from Photogram Negative. Image copyright © 2014 Vanessa Marsh.
Design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-941411-07-0
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
to my comrades—
Michael Dumanis, Rigoberto González,
Salvatore Scibona, C. Dale Young
CONTENTS
1 I
1 Tarp
6 The Documents of Spring
7 Child Holding Potato
8 Some Roses & Their Phantoms
9 The Poem is a Letter Opener
1 II
1 Brown Refrigerator
2 Daguerreotypes
3 Ode: 1975
4 Particle and Wave
5 Virgin of Guadalupe
6 Ode: 1986
7 Question Arising While Listening to a Lecture on the Nature of Metaphor
8 Tacoma Lyric
9 Chord
1 III
1 Inventory
2 Syntax
3 Whitman, 1841
4 Exegesis in Wartime
5 Election Song
6 The Man with the Crew-Cut
7 Coast Starlight
8 Triptych
9 After Darwish
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to the editors and staff of the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared: American Poetry Review, The Asian American Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cerise Press, Diode, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, Memorious, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, Tongue, TriQuarterly, Waxwing, West Branch Wired, ZYZZYVA.
“Child Holding Potato” was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribner). “Ode: 1975,” “Ode: 1986,” and “Particle and Wave” were reprinted in Field of Mirrors: An Anthology of Philippine American Writers
