The poems of The Black Beach describe everyday acts like putting 
children to bed, coaching Little League, and sending a daughter to 
school, but brood over what may be behind the everyday and how to 
reach it and talk to it. Faith ebbs and flows like the tide on a "black 
beach of heaven," while these poems maintain skepticism, denying 
transcendence beyond what is available through love, the senses, 
and experience.

"The Black Beach constantly delights with its questing, surprising, 
and not-easily-satisfied imagination. But simultaneously it creates an 
exacting and exhilarating vision of 'God, the undoer that does.' The 
speaker who, in one poem, stands in the moment 'loving/ what is not,' 
is the same one who, in another poem, imagines 'the black beach of 
heaven where all desire/ is merged, twinned, recovered, braided, and 
set ablaze.'"—Andrew Hudgins, judge

"A dark brilliance shines in these honed, memorable poems of the 
human predicament: that of a sentient particle with a mind for the 
infinite. 'Looking for meaning/ the way radio waves sought Marconi,' 
Barbarese's restless imagination searches through the stations of 
the daily to the 'very end of the dial/ the static that never signs off,' 
and turns back to receive what we have, the 'lonely surprised heart/ 
shaken. . . .'"—Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her 
Hair

"Barbarese has an uncanny ability to size up the urban scene, then 
hallow and harrow it. Putting his daughter on the local train for the 
city, he conjures up those who rode in the boxcars to the ovens. And, 
leaning over 'winged rot . . . glued . . . to shat-on grass' in a nearby 
park, he can think 'how beautiful,/ the hard frost had cemented/ what 
had lived to what never did.' He wins me over in poem after poem."
—Maxine Kumin, author of The Long Marriage

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J. T. BARBARESE has been widely published in journals and 
magazines as varied as The Georgia Review and The New York 
Times. He is the author of two books of poems in the University of 
Georgia Press's Contemporary Poets Series, and the translator of 
Euripides's Children of Herakles for the University of Pennsylvania 
Press. His degrees are from Franklin and Marshall College in 
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Temple University. He teaches at 
Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Philadelphia.


Number Twelve: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry