Cloud Pantoums
Cloud Pantoums
J. Mae Barizo
Part of the Jean Valentine Series
"The magisterial journey of desire and grief in J. Mae Barizo’s Cloud Pantoums is stunningly laden with a scenographic music never since heard before. Such is the pitch of Barizo’s questing intellect that once again we are born aloft with the knowing that suffering and love instigate waves of a lyric exploration and human depth that often leave us breathless. I have such a profound regard for the deep intimacy that is Barizo's art. My heart yields to the sensuous thinking in these poems."
—Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
October 2027
ISBN: 9781949944839
Available in both print and digital formats.
J. Mae Barizo is a writer and artist who works at the intersections of poetics, media, and performance. She is the author of The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books) and Tender Machines (Tupelo Press); Becoming Hybrid, her book of essays on transdisciplinary theory, is forthcoming from the Poets on Poetry series. She was an artist-in-residence at Baryshnikov Arts, and her monodrama "Cloud Variations" had its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2025. Born in Toronto to Filipino immigrants, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School.
Additional Praise:
"J. Mae Barizo’s incandescent poetry book Cloud Pantoums threads music, desire, and bewilderment across lines that recur and echo, to weave together a complex story of human love and longing. The poems bridge performer and audience, art and artist, history, family, the natural world. I am always impressed by Barizo’s virtuosity, the brain and heart at work on the page."
—Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost
"The poems in J. Mae Barizo’s Cloud Pantoums are ethereal skyscapes of image, ancestral memory, and billowy form. The voice in these poems pulsates in contra tempo with a wiry, Bachian discipline. Barizo navigates the space between earth, after rain and a cloud rising at dusk in a seamless circle of verse that transports the reader from one vivid indeterminacy to another. I asked the river for answers but heard nothing, says this poet. The riddles this book reveals teach us how to sense our way through any storm and into our animal, natal tongues."
—Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio
More by J. Mae Barizo:
Featured:
Kevin Goodan
“[Anaphora has] heart-searing intensity. . .”
—Library Journal
October 2018
ISBN: 9781938584961