Reviews
“Don’t let your guard down while reading Catherine Barnett’s new collection, “Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space.” Even when she’s being very funny, she’s likely to wallop you upside the head.
In the middle of a hilarious poem about Nicholson Baker losing his pants in Times Square, Barnett suddenly remembers, “We keep giving my father morphine, / now that he is officially in hospice.”
But it’s not the incongruity of these moments that’s so striking; it’s the way Barnett draws them together in a strange harmony that suddenly makes perfect sense. ”
— Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
“Barnett’s fourth collection applies a quirky eye and sparkling intelligence to the topic of loneliness.”
— New York Times
“The stunning latest from Barnett (Human Hours) blends the witty and the philosophical to offer a study in “restricted fragile materials,” or the bewildering condition of being alive. A sequence on loneliness runs through the collection, capturing the often ignored or unrendered sensations from life’s earliest moments (“The doctors snip the cord. I don’t know if that’s when it starts”) to its last in elegiac notes struck in poems for a father, and others for a friend…Urbane, perceptive, and starkly humane, these are poems of quiet alarm, at once companionable and singular.”
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
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Through poems of startling clarity and delicate humor, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space grapples with the ontological absurdity of our large-scale and everyday failures, finding space to elegize and celebrate both what we can and cannot control.”
— James Ciano, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Catherine Barnett’s Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space was published yesterday by Graywolf. Grief and farce collide throughout the book, the vertebrae of which are ten exquisite prose poems called “Studies in Loneliness.” …In between these “studies” are more gorgeous poems about living with the knowledge of our singular existence, what we must so often face alone.