Tina Barry tells her friend Henrietta just about everything
I Tell Henrietta by Tina Barry may win my “most creative idea for a poetry collection” award for the year.
It is a poetry collection, comprising free verse and prose poems.
It also might be a collection of micro-fictions.
Tina Barry
And it is a collection of arresting and often startling artwork by artist Kristin Flynn. The artwork might illustrate the poems, or the poem might explain the artwork. Maybe both.
As the title implies, the poems describes what the writer tells her friend Henrietta about her life. And the topics cover mostly everything; there are no secrets here.
She explains why chinchilla is her favorite fur. She talks about her lies ( of course, she might be lying to the reader and Henrietta about the lies she tells). She talks about vacations. And what she finds haunting, along with the shock of adoring a friend’s father until he comes home one night with a huge antlered deer in the bed of his pickup truck.
She also tells Henrietta why mermaids upset her (but it may be more the person sporting a mermaid tattoo). And swimming lessons. A neighbor’s luau. Her father’s mistress. What we did before nanny cams. Henrietta also isn’t too shy to ask the most personal of questions.
And then there was that first lake she swam in.
Questioning the Lake
Not language, not the thrill of switching
“dumb with wonder” to “wonder-dumb.”
No, what rolls beneath my words
is the first lake I swam in,
the terror of its dark water.
I had only known the burbling aqua
of pools, shallow in their openness,
and then this lapping oval,
its brow of tan stones.
Why did Henrietta’s question evoke this lake,
its image lodged now like the shadow of a lover’s hand?
Perhaps to cling to pleasure after months of famine,
to feel the lake’s fleecy bottom,
how its cool fingers circled my neck
but never let me drown.
Barry’s poems, and Flynn’s artwork, can be unsettling and often jarring. But the images are vivid, and the words are as sharp and clear as a cut gemstone.
Kristin Flynn
Barry has published two previous poetry collections, Mall Flower (2016) and Beautiful Raft (2019). Her poetry and fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and journals, including Rattle, Sky Island Journal, The Third River, Yes Poetry, and many others. She teaches poetry and fiction at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com. Barry received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Long Island University, and she lives in New York.
Flynn received a B.F.A. in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design and an A.A.S. in Textiles from Rochester Institute of Technology. She also studied painting at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited her work in group and solo shows in numerous galleries in New York City and New York State. Her residencies have included the Vermont Studio Center; Jentel in Sheridan, Wyoming; and the Platte Cove A.I.R. in Arkville, New York.
I Tell Henrietta is one of the most unusual and creative collections I’ve read. And, yes, I wonder whether Henrietta only occasionally asked questions, or did she, too, share everything with her friend? The work joins my favorite “most unusual and creative” poetry list, which includes Olio by Tyehiumba Jess (2017’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry) and The Long Take by Robin Robertson, a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2018.
Related:
Photo by S@ndrine, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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