The Alphabet of Desire

Winner of the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry.

One of the New York Public Library’s 25 Best Books of 1999

Breathless and beautiful, these poems give shape and significance to the strange and the familiar.

—New York Public Library

Barbara Hamby comes laden with laurels — Vassar Miller, Kate Tufts, and Norma Farber all lavished cash and praise on her first book of poetry, Delirium. The Alphabet of Desire should attract a similar crowd-we have raised but the first flag. It is a book of smarts, the entire first section a brilliant charge on words and language.
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—Terese Svoboda, final judge for the New York University Prize for Poetry

Hamby’s poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Santa Fe, and Hawaii in long zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line.

—Donna Seaman, Booklist, May 15, 1999

Hamby’s honest, colloquial language engenders trust in her depiction of an abstract, intercontinental, contemporary world. Lusty, unselfconscious, musical, and fresh, these poems are about the “undetonated chaos packed tight inside everyone” as we absorb the information daily cast down on us from satellites overhead. Hamby’s references range from Louis Malle to Daffy Duck, and she incorporates satire and wit into a sprawling body of poems that sing. Highly recommended.

—Ann K. Van Buren, Library Journal