Introduction to Barbara Perez

When Barbara Perez moved from San Antonio to Boston—a city she’d never visited—to join a new program’s first MFA class, she revealed a certain willingness to take risks. Her work radiates the same willingness, using logic twined with metaphor to explore passion’s depths. In poems like “Bottle,” mindfulness is the natural way to express feeling toward notions as diverse as God, memory, and those lords in law, major corporations. Her music is more than counterpoint to thought, creating meaning as sensuous as her images: pecking birds transformed to objects, humans transforming waste into art. Twice winner of UMB’s Academy of American Poets Prize, the David A. Kennedy Prize for the best work in poetry by a graduate student, and recipient of two scholarships to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Barbara Perez maintains a precision of language, diction, and imagery that holds her brilliant enterprise together.