Halo brace

Boe Robert Barnett
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:45:25 PDT

It has been my goal in the following poems to pull readers in several directions at once. By organizing the work around the emotional arc of loss, anger, and hope and its realization in love, I have attempted to present the notion that while we may be engaged in anyone stage of this cycle, our actions, decisions, and relationships may be influenced to an equal or even stronger degree by the other stages. I have tried to focus the collection's tension around these seemingly contradictory feelings; specifically, in the region where two distinct unions overlap. The first being that between the "I" (or speaker of the poem) and the Other (i.e., friends, those we admire, peers, spouse, etc.); the second, between that "I" and himself. Through formal gestures, however, it is my hope that the poems achieve the restraint necessary to avoid the sometimes solipsistic results of confessional poetics.