Resurrection Pie

A resurrection pie is defined as any dish made from yesterday’s leftovers—a meal that, in essence, rises from the dead. In this spirit, John Wall Barger’s new collection of poetry calls forth the past and its dead, describing a bardo-like psychic terrain in a language of fable and trauma. The poems move fast and strange: a man arrives at his ex-lover’s island of secrets; a mourner coughs up red flower petals; a man walks backward across Philadelphia as bodies rise out of the ground; a boy watches his dead sister’s flea circus through a magnifying glass.

In language by turns vivid and destabilizing, Barger writes the odd, the marvelous, and the wounded with unguarded clarity. Resurrection Pie is a work of serious play: absurd, intimate, melancholic. Dispatches from inside the fever dream.