Here comes the new joy.

Joy has evolved, and John W Barrios has emerged as the champion of its adaptation. Barrios’ critically imagined first collection of poetry reveals the mutation and renders the reader naturally selected.

The old joy is reaction … a product of immediacy, immediately lost. The new joy is combustion … catalyzed by pain, threat, sexuality, loss, hunger, danger, and laughter, it is the sum and the summit of all other emotions and experiences. The old joy isolates; the new joy integrates.

With gripping personal narrative in extraordinary context, Barrios’ work exemplifies the magnitude and stamina of this emotional revolution. The new joy ascends the aggregate detritus sloughed off by the old joy and stakes its claim, a mighty pen driven in victoriously at the apex. Barrios’ reimagined and redefined joy in these poems is relevant for a new time. For a new us.

Here it comes.