The Galleons
Milkweed Editions (2020)

Both stately and restless, Rick Barot’s The Galleons wrestles European mercantilism with an intimate grip, tracing a personal and historical journey from the Philippines to the Americas. With his “grudging faith in the particular,” Barot deftly oscillates between the sensuous beauty of a life keenly observed and the larger forces that inform and threaten it. “Longer than I can remember,” he writes, “I have prayed to the patron saint / of eyesight for a new way, a new accuracy.” Reader, his prayers have been answered!

Philip Metres

In The Galleons, Rick Barot brings his understated virtuosity and perceptual sensitivity to bear on issues of postcolonialism, representation, memory, and grief. Other poets have engaged with these topics, but what is remarkable here is that Barot dares to enter these arenas with a kind of radical defenselessness—having laid aside the armor of authority, attitude, or agenda. The panoptic scope of these poems shows us beauty and cruelty, love and doubt with a clarity that is both thunderous and crystalline. Barot has a well-deserved reputation as a poet’s poet, and this is his most marvelous work to date.

Monica Youn

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