A PREVALENCE OF ANGELS

These poems follow the turns of family and friendship, tracing what vanishes and what endures. Barber’s voice stays open to many kinds of messengers, and in the end, “walking to where I am,” finds a new clarity—as the ordinary and the human settle into grace.”

—Sophie Cabot Black, author of The Exchange: Poems and Geometry of the Restless Herd

More than the angels in the title, it’s sunlight and trees and wind and stones whose beautiful language watches over this book. Ms. Barber’s love for her mother and her sorrow at her death figure large, but so do other kinds of losses—R. who jumped; a friend her father’s age she sees “thinning like a twig in the elsewhere wind.” Here are some turns that especially moved me: of lying in bed, “one hand traced the other/the way an infant does/not knowing how to tell what is part of her and what is not”; of a long-term companion: “We are more than friends/there is no word for what we are” and “I could live another twenty years/with no inkling, though I lean/against the trunk of the giant oak/until the leaves cover my feet.” When, finally, she takes us home and leaves us there, what can we feel but glad we came?”

—Lola Haskins, author of Homelight: Poems and Like Zeros, Like Pearls

In her newest collection, A Prevalence of Angels, Jennifer Barber reaches toward mystery, grief, and the fragile borders between the human and the divine. Her angels emerge not in glory but as uncertain shapes, restless with doubt, sharpened by longing. With a music that transforms and connects, the poems turn to the natural world—a robin tilting its head to ask, “What is wisdom?”—and to the personal landscape of loss, whether in mourning a mother’s absence or remembering a friend who chose death. While Barber reminds us how life often resists consolation, pushing us toward distances we can’t bridge, she balances intimacy and cosmic expanse, her angels appearing in moments of stillness as well as in sudden force: “They shake their wings open./They hinge them shut.”

—Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest