Beautiful Raft

What I love so much about Beautiful Raft is how Barry’s curiosity turned into a fury-fueled exploration of how and why the partners of famous men are often ignored.

-Robert Vaughan, Funhouse, Addicts and Basements, Rift (with Kathy Fish)

In 1946, the artist Marc Chagall and his young lover Virginia Haggard moved from New York City to rural High Falls, New York. Local newspapers and magazines made much of Chagall’s arrival, but Haggard, the tall, pretty woman in the photos with her daughter Jean McNeil, was given little more than a name. The prose poems and hybrids in Tina Barry’s Beautiful Raft, written in Haggard’s and McNeil’s voices, allow the women to tell their story.

From blini ‘in a cape of butter, tipping a caviar hat’ to visits from Pierre Matisse who ‘leans against an ivory-carved walking stick he doesn’t need, ’ Barry offers a poetic succession of taut, highly charged prose poems. Kaleidoscopic in style, the book shifts from page to page, casting a different light on this loving but uneasy relationship in this deftly constructed and haunting collection.

-Alexandra van de Kamp, Kiss/Hierarchy