BkMk Press Books

Trouble Behind Glass Doors

Poems

by Walter Bargen; Mike Sleadd (cover art)

Price: $13.95, 103 pages

ISBN: 9781886157873, 2013

 

“Trouble” is organized into three sections: the first considers the poet’s varying and ambiguous role as laureate, the second contemplates and illustrates and ludicrous nature of the phrase & whole facts,” and the third meditates on the apocalyptic fate of the world around and in us.

“The title says it all,” says Bargen when asked sum up his newest book, “the ways that we fail ourselves, each other, sustaining ourselves on the earth, are there for all of us to see/read, if we will just open our eyes and minds.  I hope the panes of these poems are clear enough for all to see through.”

In Trouble Behind Glass Doors, Walter Bargen offers up—by way of those moments that adhere to us forever, those “trumpet vines / [that] once brushed the backs of our necks / at the zenith of a creaking arc”—a sympathetic voice to honor the land he lives on and the lives who seek its often difficult heart. Because “We never leave the places / we’ve lived. We construct and reconstruct our absences.” To this end, the poet has created a strong, lyrical, sometimes humorous testament that heeds a world we can very much, and gratefully, see.  

—Gary Gildner

"Walter Bargen is watching. Trouble Behind Glass Doors is masterful." —S. Scott Whitaker

See Walter interviewed and reading the poem "Missouri Moon Walk" on mid-Missouri's KBIA.  

 

Published 2013