Christian Barter

The Ends

In his most recent poetry collection, The Ends, Christian Barter explores both the landscape of Maine and the lives lived there. In “Champlain,” a poem that imagines the discovery of Mount Desert Island where Barter has lived most of his life, and in “Acadia,” a poem written in honor of the park, he addresses the issue of our stewardship of the earth, and in a series of sonnets dedicated to the outsider artist James Hampton, he explores what it means to devote a lifetime to the creation of a work of art. His own major work in this collection, a series of 34 sonnets, is a masterpiece of love poetry harkening back to Dante’s La Vita Nuova.

“Barter’s conversations with himself and a whole host of influences —Robert Lowell, Thucydides, Tracy Chapman—enact the possibility for discovery that is essential to poetry.” – Jeri Theriault, author of Self-Portrait as Homestead.

“These are the poems of a writer sure of his craft and at the height of his skill.” – Jeffrey Thomson, author of Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory.

Bye-Bye Land

BOA Editions, Ltd. 

Winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award

This award-winning book-length poem is a medley of voices in dialogue with each other—overheard, remembered, and internal -- that represents a mind at work as it considers the destructiveness of human nature, the hypocrisy and artifice of the American dream. Voices from personal conversations, political speeches, Guantanamo detainees, news reports, and famous poets fill these pages, ultimately capturing a world of disrupted beauty and unrealized potential. 

In Someone Else's House

What a good poet Christian Barter is, whose poems make you believe—a difficult artistic feat—that poetry is an utterly natural act.  Reading them is like being handed a set of x-rays in the doctor’s office; you look at them, dumbfounded at how familiar these blurry shapes are—“Oh yes," you think, “that is my youth, that is my brain, those are my dreams, that is my heart—”                                       

—Tony Hoagland

There are poets who can bring us to tears; there are poets who can make us ponder vast societal and existential issues; there are poets whose irony moves us at once to ruefulness and to dark laughter; there are poets who fruitfully challenge our intellectual capacities. But Christian Barter is that rarest of writers, the one who can make us react in all these ways, and often simultaneously.       

—Sydney Lea

Barter won't waste your time with archness, or meta-meta twiddling, or disposable Cool.  He's a warmly funny and passionately thoughtful poet whose characteristic note is a hurt yet irrepressible joy.   His lean and expert poems are the real thing:  they have something to say, they are moving, they matter.  

—James Richardson