J.R. Barner is a writer, teacher, and musician from Athens, Georgia
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THE OCEAN UNDERGROUND & OTHER POEMS
An all-new collection of poems that examine the mysterious and murky waters of the human experience. In these poems, J.R. Barner explores the hiddenness of the everyday, the gradual toll secrets take, and the possibilities in between. These poems map the contours that exist when the lives of people, imagined and real (Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Foster, Marina Abramovic, and Dame Margaret Drabble, to name but a few) and real and imagined places, breathlessly circling the globe from the Arizona high desert to London, Paris, and Okinawa, are skewed, ever so slightly, to expose their more profound truths. Along the way, Barner invites us to see where we fit into these strange, new unfolding vistas.
"In an incredible range of registers, The Ocean Underground plays with our perception of who we are and what we know."
EVA ALDEA, AUTHOR OF SINGAPORE
"Haunting and hypnotic, J. R. Barner has composed a time-bending pilgrimage through the realms of human experience."
AMANDA DZIMIANSKI, AUTHOR OF ACHE IS A PASSPORT
"There is, beneath and among us, another, older world, and Barner has returned from below with a message of compassionate truth."
ALEXANDER JOHNS, AUTHOR OF DARWIN’S BOOK OF SAINTS
LITTLE EULOGIES
Little Eulogies is J.R. Barner’s debut poetry collection.
Representing over thirty years of continuous writing, Little Eulogies serves up a series of dreamlike vignettes featuring real and imaginary persons and places. These poems blend a grasping, anonymous inner voice with a dazzling array of celebrities, including walk-on parts by the likes of Robert Lowell, Tracey Emin, Edie Sedgwick, Susan Atkins, Alanis Morissette, and (the parents of) Patty Hearst. Like a time-traveler’s travelogue, Little Eulogies teleports from New York City during the late 70’s heyday of punk rock to the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests to Central London, Baltimore, Maryland, Newport, Rhode Island, rural Virginia, and the streets of Paris before landing in the middle of the outdoor rave scene along England’s M25 highway in the early 90’s and concluding with a poignant layover in Austin, Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Little Eulogies shifts from blank verse to the traditional sonnet form, to prose poems in an evocative bricolage of narration that offers a unique view of place, gender, and popular culture. There are attempts here to rewrite both the love story and the ghost story for the 21st century, explore the persistent influence of Roman bucolics on today’s increasingly Blade Runner-like landscape, and communicate complex emotions in an already pixelated world. Through this multiplicity of voice, time, and place, from the sub-basement of the White House to the mountains of Belize, there is no shortage of self, or, rather, all of us, in these poems. These are true stories, with a twist. In short, Little Eulogies examines the ghosts of both the past and the future, but through the lens of just a few moments ago.
