The Devil Is a Child

In a voice visceral and searing, Collin Barber has taken the solitudes of haiku and the short songs of tanka and turned them on their heads, in conscious supplication to whatever redemptions the art of poetry might offer. These are poems of unquiet and torment. They are written in the flaring language of self-reproach and personal hell, bent moonlight and splattered blood. As such, The Devil is a Child calls upon the reader as a lost soul calls upon a friend: for succor, understanding, and forgiveness. Barber reminds us that such things are often lost for want of asking, and that silence gives consent. With this book Barber has achieved a kind of modern miniature by a dweller in Dante's Inferno, without the liturgical trappings.