Barley Child

“Like the characters in all the best poetry collections—and this is one of those—the people who inhabit the ‘blown-gasket town’ depicted here are utterly different from you and me and also exactly like us. How is this possible? Through Greg Rappleye’s unfailing artistry.” —David Kirby, author of The House on Boulevard St.

“Greg Rappleye welds a poet’s ear for cadence and music to a novelist’s eye for detail, opening up for us a Hiberno-inflected Americana. Here in controlled diction, deployed for dizzying effect, we find lives without privilege, lives of stratified emotion layered upon a cornucopia of plant life, urban bric-a-brac, and mid-twentieth-century cultural artifacts. Rappleye paints for us a portrait of a time which is no more, but which can never fade completely while recorded by his precise language.” —Patrick Cotter, author of Sonic White Poise

“Barley Child is a collection so vividly imagined and so beautifully written that one hesitates to read the final poem, not wanting the spell to end.” —Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland