Fossil & Wing

Winner of the 2023 Wil Mills Award - West Chester University Poetry Center

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The paired nouns of Jason Barry’s title Fossil & Wing evoke persistence and flight, death and elevation. Like William Blake, Barry has the gift of thinking in images and opposites, realized in human predicaments—but here, images as vividly contemporary as the “steam stick” on a bathroom window after a shower, or the weeds on a train track: emblems in a terrain of losses and reflections. — Robert Pinsky

There is a subtle clarity of voice in these poems—the way they create and hold space for the unspoken emotion, the feeling we may not even quite realize that we have. At their best, the poems in Fossil & Wing use all the skills of poetry—exemplary skill with meter and its often ingenious structuring of formal poetic elements—to create a safe space in which to become more human. — Annie Finch

The sonic and visual precision in Jason Barry’s Fossil & Wing makes for startling discoveries: “a crush of brittle leaves beneath the stride/and how at certain times, the wind would/shape the fumes into a fox behind our truck/” (“Pruning”). What flies or escapes, winged, of the fossil rock of memory, “glazed fresh or drawn in rubato light” (“Tracks”) is as gorgeous as it is unexpected, I am reminded of Dickinson and Stevens, and an expansive reticence in the lyric tradition which Barry’s gifts continue. — Adrianne Kalfopoulou

What is remarkable in Jason Barry’s poems is their powerful focus on the details of individual experience, often captured as a tension between tender lyricism and emotional violence, between a certain formal and tonal discretion and a perfect knowledge of the world’s cruelty. “Sensory is synonym for soul,” he declares, and the work in Fossil & Wing confirms this formula at every turn. — Karl Kirchwey