You Good Thing

By Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier)

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• This title is no longer available.
  

  In her first new collection of poetry since 2006, Dara Wier contorts language in an attempt to define the indefinable. Her loose sonnets insist on a living language in the face of death, cycling and vibrant as the water that runs through them.

• Wier’s 11th collection delights in its turnings and tangents, line to line, poem to poem.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Wier is a poet concerned with capturing the fluidity of thought and experience—and not diminishing its forward charge in doing so. Wier’s lines have always had a wild whitewater crash to them, overwhelming any vessel she pours them into.
  Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe
  
  The ethics of the good, its generous, alchemical humility, is the good of Wier’s poetry. Alongside her other epithets—scintillating, hilarious, restless, impish—I’m adding Orphic. These are Orpheus poems. If one were to retell the Eurydice myth in light of Dickinson’s “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act,” You Good Thing might be the result. “For a good long time, I plan to love you . . . / You’re not going to turn around when you leave who is you.”
  Michael D. Snediker, Boston Review
  
  Wier has toyed with her poetic body to an incredible extent, and You Good Thing serves as an interactive exhibition of what it means to make poems, most importantly as a social human being.
  Wesley Rothman, The Los Angeles Review
  
  Each lineated into 14 lines, the poems masquerade as sonnets but wander far from the form. The sonnet traditionally moves thought forward to its logical conclusion, a poetics of reason. Often Wier’s sentences depart in this logical direction, as if ready to solve an abstraction like a proof, but arrive in a far more chaotic—and, strangely, coherent—place.
  Eric Dean Wilson, BOMBlog
  
  Wier does convincingly what few poets can: pinpoint in words those overwhelming moments of upheaval, obfuscation and misdirection...
  Karen Meadows, The Hollins Critic
  
  The poems are expansive and intimate, the tone is distant and tender, and the images are decontextualized and vivid. You Good Thing, like most of Wier’s work, renders the personal and the universal simultaneously, and this quality sets her work apart with the best poetry of our time...In the collection, imagination and memory converge to reveal places within places, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.
  Jordan Sanderson, Heavy Feather Review
  
  Wier’s You Good Thing reminds us that pleasure, like a river, is dangerous, ridiculous, mysterious, takes aimlessness for its aim, and is—above all else—necessary.
  Julia Anjard Maher, Colorado Review
  

• Dara Barrois/Dixon (née Dara Wier) is the author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022). Other titles include In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2014), Reverse Rapture (Verse Press, 2005), Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon, 2001).  She has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Center Book Award, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council have generously supported her work. Limited editions include (X in Fix)(2003) from Rain Taxi’s brainstorm series), Thru (2019) and Two Poems (2021) from Scram, and forthcoming in 2022,  Nine Poems from Incessant Pipe. With James Tate, she rescued The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke, published by Waiting for Godot Books. Poems can be found in Granta, Volt, Conduit,, Incessant Pipe, Biscuit Hill, blush, can we have our ball back, Itinerant, American Poetry Review, Octopus, Gulf Coast, and The Nation. She’s been poet-in-residence at the University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.  She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.