Barley Child

Greg Rappleye is the author of A Path Between Houses, Figured Dark, and Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, and is a former Bread Loaf Fellow in Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry,the Southern Review,the North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the English department at Hope College in Michigan.

"Like the characters in all the best poetry collections-and this is one of those-the people who inhabit the 'blown-gasket town' depicted here are utterly different from you and me and also exactly like us. How is this possible? Through Greg Rappleye's unfailing artistry." -David Kirby, author of The House on Boulevard St. "Greg Rappleye welds a poet's ear for cadence and music to a novelist's eye for detail, opening up for us a Hiberno-inflected Americana. Here in controlled diction, deployed for dizzying effect, we find lives without privilege, lives of stratified emotion layered upon a cornucopia of plant life, urban bric-a-brac, and mid-twentieth-century cultural artifacts. Rappleye paints for us a portrait of a time which is no more, but which can never fade completely while recorded by his precise language." -Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise "Barley Child is a collection so vividly imagined and so beautifully written that one hesitates to read the final poem, not wanting the spell to end." -Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland