Chord ***

In Chord, his third collection of poems, Rick Barot leads us through far-flung concerns, continually hovering in a space between real and imagined. The days are gods. The manzanita trees are gods. Gardens bloom all white or all black or not at all. Typhoon Nina shakes Barot’s childhood home in the Philippines all over again, and the sugarcane fields burn and burn. The Annunciation is rewritten. Barot campaigns for governor. Family members die and the surviving relatives are still arguing. The towers fall. The dead are burned with their horses.