Hands in Clay

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>A radical radiant melancholy is the light that comes from Mildred Kiconco Barya's poems. Moonlight hellfire </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>komorebi</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> - light filtered through leaves. And the light from fires - buried rekindled luminous - a cremating fire of ritual and transformation of experience. Barya has a discourse with the spirit world in dreams and receives messages from ancestors phantom children and the dead which proves the real world is porous and miraculous. Barya has a witchy power and has written a haunted book that manufactures wonder.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>-Bruce Smith </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Spill</em></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>If one's hand is in clay it means one is caught in a flux a thickness that is somehow also seductively light. The hand and heart of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>this</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> poet are drenched in a clay so rich with minerals and meaning hazard and hope they teach us how to make and unmake to dream while staying awake and to rejoice even as one grieves. Guided by the wisdom of ancestors and the not-yet-born by goats and tea leaves and strangers in traffic Mildred Kiconco Barya's lusty and persistent poems show us how everything is through-as in </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>veil</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> if not </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>vale</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. Though the journey is from life to death to rebirth the fog is omnipresent and [e]very few seconds the celestial / bodies exchange positions: matter and time are recyclable and experience ever renewed.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>-Aditi Machado </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Material Witness</em></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Passing effortlessly through the thin membrane that separates the real from the fantastical Mildred Kiconco Barya's </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Hands in Clay</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> takes the reader on a spectacular journey. The speaker in these poems is simultaneously wide-eyed and knowing an infant/yet full of years and like the woman seated beside the speaker of The Things You Encounter on a Flight marveling at the sunset Barya has nudged her into seeing the reader will want to reach out to figuratively hold the hand of the creator of these fine poems.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>-Christopher Kennedy </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Strange God Who Makes Us</em></p><p></p>