Moving the Bones / Rick Barot / Milkweed Editions, October 15, 2024 – $16 (paperback)

“You are told to believe in one paradise / and then there is the paradise you come to know,” begins Rick Barot. What follows is Barot’s Moving the Bones, a profound excavation of the liminal spaces between those poles. This is, at its core, an exploration within the rooms of love and memory, of life’s singular end, of the lineage of cemeteries, of dawn. Yet Barot does not offer easy answers; instead, he invites us to sit with our uncertainties, to find pleasure in the act of noticing. For Barot, this presence of mind is an art of being lost in thought. 

Through tender verse, Barot precisely unfolds the body within this collection. Lungs swell, hands ripen, knees age—all reminders of impermanence and the physical. Barot’s language elevates these realities into moments of quiet reverence, of cherry blossoms, lungs, and Rembrandts; of standing in a Goodwill, watching a boy with a flower behind his ear, ephemeral murmurs of meaning floating all around him. Barot finds meaning in the vulnerable, finds a voice in the unspeakable: “But understand that if you look at something long enough, it will have something to say to you.” This is how we are able to bear the opening maw of loss, the erasure of solitude, the body’s gradual slant towards death. 

This duality—between the external and the interior, between the immediate and the enduring—is perhaps the collection’s greatest strength. Barot’s poems are meditative glimpses of a mind in conversation with itself. The poems tether themselves to the textures of life while gesturing toward something larger, ineffable. The everyday becomes a site of discovery.

By stripping himself to skin, Barot brings us close enough to witness the lyrical work of consciousness—a kind of opening. Moving the Bones is an invitation to dwell; to inhabit the present as it passes, to bear the weight of loss as it lightens, to capture beauty in what is fleeting. Barot’s verse reminds us that being lost in thought is not a way to escape, but a way to be present. These poems speak to the part of life where the past feels close, the future looms, and the moment in between is all we truly have.

– Bohan Gao