Landscape with Bloodfeud

“In Landscape with Bloodfeud there are at least two ways to go. There is a path to some kind of justice. and there is a path to the end of mercy. Barnes’s poetry admits homesickness driven by shame, guilt, love, and most of all, a search for some kind of truth to be found in the place the speaker damns and praises, loves and left. In tortuously rich poems, this book records a private coming to terms. ‘But surely I exaggerate this shame / just to give myself a pass— / do I think I’m virtuous because I claim / these past misdeeds?’”—Dara Wier, author of You Good Thing

“There is an eloquent and brave kind of cartography here. These poems have in them a burgeoning, a flood of language, image, culture, and a stark interrogation of the American self that make them essential. ‘Welcome / to the parish of fenced-in / vernacular.’ Landscape with Bloodfeud is an exquisitely crafted and mesmerizing debut collection.”—Sean Nevin, author Oblivio Gate
 
“Landscape with Bloodfeud is remarkable for its paradoxical strengths: its descriptive power and delicacy, its weave of linguistic panache with rhetorical nonchalance, the sheer scale of the conception and the line-by-line finesse. Remarkable already, even before the reader takes in that the whole bloody saga takes place on a tightrope of conscience.”—Robert Carnevale, co-translator of Apollo in the Grass: Selected Poems