Bird Odyssey - (Pitt Poetry) by Barbara Hamby (Paperback)

About the Book

Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in Bird Odyssey she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following The Odyssey from Troy to Ithaka.

Book Synopsis

Travel has always been Barbara Hamby's muse, and in Bird Odyssey she hits the road hard, riding a train across Siberia, taking a car trip from Memphis to New Orleans on Highway 61, and following The Odyssey from Troy to Ithaka. The concatenation of images released include Elvis and Tolstoy cruising through the sky in a pink Cadillac, Homer and Robert Johnson discussing their art in the Underworld, and the women in The Odyssey telling their side of the story, because what's a woman to do in this world of men? She has to strike out on her own, ask the right questions, and tell her own story, translating the world into her own bright lie.

Review Quotes

Past praise for All-Night Lingo Tango:
Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix that one can't help devouring.--Susie DeFord "Bomblog"

Past praise for Babel:
One has only to read a few pages of Babel to feel in the presence of a poet with a unique, many-layered consciousness, and a few more pages to realize that her considerable verbal dexterity and mastery of tone are qualities she's capable of sustaining. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high- wire performer's notion of a good time.-- "Stephen Dunn, final judge for the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poetry"

Past praise for On the Street of Divine Love:
The divine love in this book is at heart the love of poetry itself, and to partake of these poems is to share a measure of the poet's devotion.--George Bradley "The Yale Review"

Hamby's poetry always takes us on a journey. . . . fun for all readers.-- "Library Journal"

About the Author

Barbara Hamby is the author of Holoholo, Bird Odyssey, and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Burn is her eighth book of poems. In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai'i, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University, where she is distinguished university scholar, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.