In Someone Else's House

What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believe—a difficult artistic feat—that poetry is an utterly natural act. Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctor’s office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are— “Oh yes, “you think, “that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart—”

I keep reading Barter because the honesty of his songs and stories encourages me to be more honest and more compassionate about my own condition, of course. They are also funny, smart and lyrical.
—Tony Hoagland

Christian Barter writes about love and mortality and justice and, over and over, the difficult and amazing fact of our separateness from everyone else—not the Capital Letter versions of those feelings, but the ones that sweep through you listening to music, or musing late at night, or just driving along. Barter won’t waste your time with archness, or meta-meta twiddling, or disposable Cool. He’s a warmly funny and passionately thoughtful poet whose characteristic note is a hurt yet irrepressible joy. His lean and expert poems are the real thing: they have something to say, they are moving, they matter.

—James Richardson

There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously. Such multiplicity of response, he teaches us, is our sole way of dealing with the strange sense that, at least metaphorically, we are always in someone else’s house. Barter everywhere considers what I must call—though the label is vexingly reductive —the nature of human truth. This book is a marvel.
—Sydney Lea


These poems come from a poet firmly in the middle of his life, and speaking with such authority they place us in the middle of ours, with all of our moral and emotional complexities. In music that is sometimes classical, sometimes a verbal bebop of speed and virtuosity, Christian Barter’s fine intelligence probes the nature of beauty and love, while remaining grounded in daily experience. Happiness and despair, regret and affirmation, loss and wisdom continually morph, one into the other. As if describing his own methods, Barter speaks of “one thought becoming the next by music and dream,” and that describes the beauty of this book, its improvisational perfection, its refusal, despite all evidence to the contrary, to give up on its loves.
—Betsy Sholl