Barn Burned, Then

"Imagine this: sentences broken into phrases at fault lines of testimony, where the words 'barn' and 'bank' animate the economies and concerns of our lives. Barn Burned, Then implicates Objectivism in this imagining, to create poems of the conglomerate of bank and barn—words shown to be made of contingent cultural forces. By chance—that is to say, by the happenstance that changes lives irrevocably—are these poems wrought. (What legitimizes happenstance remains in the background.) With Barn Burned, Then Michelle Taransky becomes the worthy winner of Omnidawn’s initial publication of emerging talent."—Marjorie Welish

"Michelle Taransky’s Barn Burned, Then explores the hidden economies of a derelict American dream. In this ingeniously unified and mercilessly fractured collection of poems, the barn and the bank—those fundamental repositories of value—become sites for an elegiac meditation on signification itself. What is a barn? 'A windowless address / put up to the shadow-maker.' What is a bank? 'A way to get more for less.' With uncanny foresight, this postmodern Cassandra’s lyrical utterance warn us about the Ponzi scheme of modernity, while simultaneously 'taking care // Of our ailing want / To piece back together // All that has parted.'"—Srikanth Reddy

"Michelle Taransky takes her title from Masahide’s 17th century haiku: 'Barn’s burnt down – / now / I can see the moon.' There, physical loss is a gateway to an ecstatic gain of focus. Here, barns still burn, but the haze that hovers over the disappeared structures is more fiscal than physical: banks, not lightning or arson, would seem to be the (in)efficient causes. In two interlocked series, 'Burn Book' and 'Bank Book,' Taransky uses her fluency in frame-scanning, collage, and abstraction to alert readers to the depth of tinder we live amid."—Bob Perelman