Product Description
A third collection from a poet whose "beautiful sentences weave the miraculous and mundane into a single, luminous tapestry" (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Barbara has won acclaim for fluid and graceful poems that touch on the small occurrences and mysteries of daily life in the hopes of finding the secret meaning beneath them. Both intimate and wide ranging, her work is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, and sometimes comedic. Her third collection, The Last Skin, extends and develops these qualities, offering landscapes and characters both domestic and exotic, in poignant personal lyrics of precise description that investigate beauty, grief, death, fragility, time, and loss. Here is a poet engaged with the spirit as well as the political, blending the give and take of the world into her own ecstatic rhythms.

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Customer Reviews (1)

morbidly repetitive
The one poem, The Last Skin, was moving and a couple of others were enjoyable but overall I thought it was same old, same old and not very insightful or uplifting.I couldn't find a single quotable passage. ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets, Given in Memory of Eric Mathieu King "This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning."-C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:"But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fledWhether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone-how to laugh, how to hope, how to love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Brilliant contemporary poetry
This is contemporary poetry at its best: brilliant, funny, and direct. There are no private puzzles here, no clever obscurities. Just smart observations, surprising imagery, sharp language.

"I used to dream souls, puffed up and sighing"
BITE EVERY SORROW is a multihued book full of both a strange sadness and the glowing wonder of laughter."If there are oceans to saddle/ if you could get there, catch the horse/ if you are holy, long enough/ the suger will be taken from your right hand." Ras writes.She provides the saddle, and if you are holy enough, it will certainly give you an exhilarating ride through the lush scenery of her soul.

wonderful!
Ras discribes everyday life as if it were all genuine feelings. Wonderful discriptive language that paints many bright colored pictures. ... Read more

Product Description
Using long-lined, imaginative leaps to connect the everyday with the miraculous, the intimate with the visionary, Barbara Ras-s poems surge across the page like waves crashing on a beach. She crafts the forty-one new poems in this collection with a zany and spacious cunning that reaches from family to community, from what-s cherished to what-s lost, from culture to nature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Powerful Writing
This is deeply rooted writing that must come from experience.Reminds me in a way that I can't explain of Annie Dillard.Don't go looking the the happy go lucky here.This is serious writing that lays bear both the pains and joys of life and points, perhaps, in the hard direction that you can't have one without the other.

One Hidden Stuff
Barbara Ras is one of my favorite poets. She writes in long, elegant sentences, and finds beauty in everything without being cliched or pretentious.
Ras's poetry is miles away from the short sentenced, right to the point poetry of Neruda and other greats: I really can't think of another poet to compare her to.
Ras certainly isn't a poet that you could read even if you weren't a fan of poetry, but for lovers of poetry she's certainly something that must be looked into. She makes relevant references to the world, going from politics to nature to sex, and there isn't a bad one in the bunch. My recommendation is to read the poems it will let you sample and decide for yourself what you think. ... Read more

Product Description
26 Costa Rican stories, many in first translations Amazon.com Review
Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion has beencompiled in an attempt to provide tourists with a differentperspective on the country. Each of the twenty-six remarkable storiesin this collection has been selected to reflect the geographical areain which it is set. (Though Costa Rica is only about half the size ofIreland, it is wonderfully diverse.) Story settings range from thehigh valleys of the central plateau to the flatlands of the Caribbeancoast to the plains of Guanacaste. A typical guidebook will instructvisitors on the politics, history, culture, economy, and ethnicity ofa country, but only fiction can portray its soul. After reading thestories contained in this literary companion, travelers to Costa Ricawill no doubt view this Central American nation with whole new eyes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Nice literary travel companion
This enjoyable collection of short stories is a nice companion to any visit to Costa Rica. The stories are "literary" in nature...one shouldn't expect explorers crashing through rainforests chasing after "savages", nor anything related to 2012 doomsday prophecies or pyramid-top sacrifices.

The stories do, however, provide a nice bit of color and flavor to each of Costa Rica's different regions. Visitors to the northwest province of Guanacaste will be a bit disappointed by only one story focused on that popular travel destination.

Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literay Companion
This book was in very good shape, you could not tell it was used. The book was very interesting and gave me a locals view of this beautiful country. Costa Rica has always prided itself for making education one of it's top priorities and this book shows the results. All the stories were well written, some had historical importance and all were very insightful. I would recommend this book to anyone, whether they are traveling to Costa Rica or not.

One of the Few Collections Devoted to Writing from Costa Rica
This book came out in 1993 and was one of the first publications in this traveler's literary companion series, a beautiful attempt to introduce a wide range of foreign writers to English-language readers. It contained 26 works by 20 writers. There were 23 short stories and 3 excerpts from novels.

The oldest writers in the collection were Carmen Lyra (1888-1949), Mario González Feo (1897-1969) and Max Jiménez (1900-47). The most recent were Alfonso Chase (1945-), Alfredo Aguilar (1959-) and Uriel Quesada (1962-). Others included Carlos Luis Fallas (1909-65), a writer of the working class and social protest who's been called one of the nation's most widely read authors; Yolanda Oreamuno (1916-56); Joaquín Gutiérrez (1918-2000); Fabián Dobles (1918-97) and Julieta Pinto (1922-), who were called major voices; Carmen Naranjo (1928-), who appears to be among the writers most frequently translated into English; Abel Pacheco (1933-), recently the nation's president; and Quince Duncan (1940-), who was described as a chronicler of Costa Rica's blacks. Of all the authors, five were women.

As far as could be determined, the pieces ranged from the 1930s (Lyra, Jiménez, Oreamuno) to the 1990s (Naranjo, Chase). Three-fourths of the works came from the 1960s to 90s, the rest from the 1930s and 40s.

The works covered the north and south, the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, the capital/the central valley, and a mountainous area in the north. A final section contained stories on the nation as a whole and was one of the strongest sections. In general, the longer pieces were most enjoyed.

The introduction provided little background on the nation's literary development. Judging from info on the Internet, the modern literature dates to the late 1800s. Trends over the following decades have included influence from European literary traditions; an opposing preference for local themes; nationalism and social protest; modernism (with less impact than elsewhere in Latin America); realism; and occasionally magical realism.

A number of the stories in the collection showed a great sensitivity to nature, focusing on the harvesting of fan palms, the screeching of cicadas, tropical rain, steam rising from the earth, the sound, smell and taste of the sea, as well as descriptions of trees, flowers, frogs, birds and lizards (Jiménez, Oreamuno, Quesada, Dobles, Rima de Vallbona, Aguilar, Naranjo, Fallas).

A few employed magical realism -- applying to reality some exaggeration and absurdity, or blending hallucination and reality (Jiménez, Oreamuno, Naranjo, Aguilar). Others drew attention directly or in passing to social inequity or untoward foreign influence (Lyra, Dobles, Vallbona, José León Sánchez, Pacheco). One of these, by Sánchez, was written from the point of view of a young girl trying to escape poverty and showed well the many obstacles: lack of health, sanitation, nutrition, money, learning, sexual education, role models, and protection from those who meant harm.

Another piece (Ducoudray) managed to combine protest with magical realism, in the form of mysterious pairs of wings brought by an unnamed company from overseas 90 years before, which claimed occasional victims and spread contagious diseases. Other stories were concerned more with urban alienation and sexual frustration (Samuel Rovinski) or the inability to fathom another person's motivations (Chase).

Stylistically, among the more interesting pieces for this reader were one by Dobles, in the form of a diary kept by two Americans competing against an unnamed fruit conglomerate in the early 1900s. One by Pacheco, in the form of voices telling their stories in a manner akin to Spoon River Anthology. And a monologue by Gutiérrez, in which a man at the end of his rope recounted his adventures and rued the passing of time.

In one connection or another, a handful of the stories mentioned the unnamed conglomerate, which the introduction identified as the American-owned United Fruit Company. One of the largest employers in Central America before World War II, it appears also in the pages of authors like Asturias, Neruda and García Márquez. In the present collection, it was shown building railroads to the interior, setting up company towns, driving small competitors out of business, and buying on favorable terms from local banana farmers. An excerpt in the collection from a novel by Fallas--Mamita Yunai (1941)--showed the comradeship of the hard-working construction gangs it employed.

Readers who enjoy all these things ought to enjoy this collection, it's fine as a travel guide, and it's a very useful introduction to the nation's writing over the 20th century, for which there appear to be no other widely available collections in English.

There wasn't the social satire of writers like Brazil's Machado de Assis or Mexico's Juan José Arreola, the concern with humorous tales and social customs of Peru's Ricardo Palma and the Dominican Republic's Juan Bosch, or the concern with Indian subjects of a writer like Mexico's Rosario Castellanos. The tragic sense of life in some of the pieces wasn't conveyed quite as powerfully for this reader as in the best writing of Uruguay's Horacio Quiroga, Brazil's Graciliano Ramos or Mexico's Juan Rulfo. And other pieces weren't as dazzling as the best magical realism from writers of the 1960s boom like Fuentes and Cortázar, a precursor such as Borges and successors like Puig and Arenas, or experimental on the order of Lezama Lima, Cabrera Infante, or Sarduy. Still, there was much to enjoy.

Other collections containing Costa Rican writers include When New Flowers Bloomed: Short Stories by Women Writers from Costa Rica and Panama (1991) and Contemporary Short Stories from Central America (1994).

Wonderful read
I purchased this book before a trip to Costa Rica, read it and then read it again when I got back.The stories are fabulous, well-written, and give a wonderful insight into this glorious country.I will probably read it again.

Visiting Costa Rica
A good read whenvisitingthe country. I enjoyed/understood the stories much more when I visited Costa Rica andtherefore the context in which they were written albeit that many of the stories were written in the earier part ofthe 20th century. Short stories were a good idea when travelling around ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Eleanor Wilner, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Barbara Ras, Debra Spark, Sebastian Matthews, Adria Bernardi, A. Van Jordan, Debra Allbery. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 30. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Eleanor Rand Wilner (born 1937 Ohio) is an American poet, and editor. She graduated from Goucher College, and from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. She was editor of The American Poetry Review, and she is Advisory Editor of Calyx. She has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Smith College. She is on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives in Philadelphia. She has been active in civil rights and peace movements. ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=25387268 ... Read more

Product Description
An anthology of poetry featuring established and upcomingpoets, including Harry Brody, Lucille Clifton, Dionisio Martinez,Maude Meehan, Ruth Stone, Anna Rabinowitz, Martin Tucker and others. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 2010. The length of the article is 316 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Last Skin.(Brief article)(Book review)
Author: Benjamin S. Grossberg
Publication: The Antioch Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2010
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 68Issue: 3Page: 599(2)

Article Type: Book review, Brief article

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more