Reviewed by Erica Goss
By Rachel Barton
ISBN: 9781599489926
Main Street Rag, (2024)
88 pages, $14, Paper
The title poem, “Jacob’s Ladder,” unfolds through five scenes: an observation of a late-blooming dahlia named “Big Red,” the altered stated of a migraine headache, a young man getting high while dressed in “cheetah faux fur,” a phone call from a grieving sister who “sends the grey of her grief out the door,” and at the end, the comfort of home, where the speaker is “enveloped in blue.” Although they seem unrelated at first, Barton places each scene in the ostensibly unplanned way the events of our days build on each other. Only with hindsight do we understand the subtle connections that weave a life together.
A similar awareness permeates “Permission to Fail.” Like “Jacob’s Ladder,” the poem is structured as a five-element list. Here, the associations between the short, numbered sections are even more tenuous. As the title indicates, each part describes an ill-fated person or situation, which the last stanza makes apparent:
Some of us shoot for a star and fail. Faint arcs
of remembrance like trailing embers fall below the horizon—
—spark enough to distract an old donkey from his loneliness.
Those “trailing embers” remain in our consciousnesses, emerging as dreams and ideas. On occasion they become actual, physical objects. “Hats and Chairs and Other Exhibits” takes its title from a collection of historical relics displayed in a small Oregon college town museum. We follow the speaker as she moves through rooms of curios, from “ghosts, their hats / suspended above empty chairs like a grand / homage to René Magritte” to “a collection of Ukrainian hand-colored eggs.” The poem raises the question of what these remnants of past lives tell us about those who left them:
The things we dropped, the things we saved—random
objects in a loose curation, each with the hint of a story.
When she stumbles on a pair of abandoned pants, “smallish and androgynous-looking, / with a grey cake of dirt from hip to knee,” the speaker in “Possible Evidence of Our Inter-Dimensionality” grasps that every item reverberates with its own history:
Who knows what slipstream might open—
what portal might appear?
And what artifact shall I leave behind?
Rachel Barton’s new book creates a narrative about what it means to live on a planet filled with the cast-off remnants of other lives. This focus invites the reader to see the objects we acquire and abandon as a collection of intimate, evocative artifacts, each one capable of opening a door to a deeper understanding of our shared humanity. Like Jacob’s dream of a ladder to Heaven, Barton’s poetry rises on the hope of redemption through unexpected moments of insight.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, Slant, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. She is the founder of Girls’ Voices Matter, a filmmaking workshop for teen girls. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016. Erica is the editor of the newsletter Sticks & Stones.
Rachel Barton is poet, editor, and writing coach. She edited and curated her own her own Willawaw Journal through twenty issues concluding with the Spring Issue 2025. She currently serves as associate editor for Cloudbank Books. Her poems have been published in the Main Street Rag, Across the Margins, the Oregon English Journal, CIRQUE, and several other journals. Find her recently released collection, This is the Lightness (The Poetry Box) and her newest collection Jacob’s Ladder on her website, rachelbartonwriter.com.
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