Those Roads, These Moons by Wendy Barker
Alabrava Press, 2024
“Not a straight and narrow track, but open / sky all day. . .” And so begins Wendy Barker’s final (and posthumously published) chapbook. Part-confessional, part-critique, Those Roads, These Moons is as skillfully constructed as it is refreshingly frank. In such tellingly titled poems as “Cockroaches” and “Driving While White,” Barker, to her credit, and with trademark awareness (as well as a keen sense of humor), acknowledges her own privilege and even implicates herself in an otherwise oppressive system. As she concludes in “Driving While White,” having just admitted to using her appearance to her benefit when stopped for speeding, “In the Sixties, when I asked my Black lover / why not get married, I wanted his babies, he / said, ‘You don’t know how hard it could get.’”
Though different in place and time (if not in form), “Cockroaches” operates on an equally strong sense of social awareness and an attendant sense of indignation on the part of the speaker. In both “Driving While White” and “Cockroaches,” figures of law enforcement embody racial injustice in the United States. In both poems, a connection is established between the present and the past: the disproportionate traffic stops of racial minorities and the racial segregation of the ’60s, in the former; excessive police response to BLM protests and the Atlantic Passage, in the latter. In both pieces, a mobile symbol is used as the vehicle for the metaphor: a car, in the former; a bug, in the latter. In the hands of a less-skilled white poet, “Cockroaches” could unintentionally (though no less injuriously) blur the insectival imagery with the communities of color against which such language has been hurled and with which the speaker empathizes and clearly admires. In Barker’s skillful hands, however, the attribution of insectival imagery and language to members of law enforcement is both unapologetic and unambiguous.
Though most of Barker’s other poems are not as explicitly political as “Cockroaches” or “Driving While White,” a current of social awareness and the speaker’s strong sense of their relationship to others nonetheless pervades the pieces. In “Another Way to Look at Fall,” for example, Barker, comparing the proactive (if seemingly uncompromising) behavior of a tree toward an otherwise helpless leaf to the sacrifices made for the sake of the whole during the pandemic, reflects, “Now I’m / thinking how this pandemic means / forfeiting affectionate hugs / with closest friends, symphony seats / where we’d be thrilled by violins, / even visits to my one son / who lives across the continent.” As with “Cockroaches,” “Another Way to Look at Fall” could, in the hands of a lesser poet, try to clumsily find the good in a global tragedy. In Barker’s skilled hands, however, it is clear that what the poet seeks is not a silver lining but a renewed understanding. So, too, with the other poems in which Barker encounters loss but acknowledges it and moves forward with it, as opposed to trying to redeem it.
With a message as urgent today as it was when Barker was still here, Those Roads, These Moons not only recounts but gives witness and calls out, intertwining the private with the public. To gain a glimpse into Barker’s life is to gain an understanding of what animated her, what made her write and for whom and what. Far from a literary swan song, Those Roads, These Moons is anything but plaintive; rather, it is completely and unapologetically alive. With such care and art, Barker, having crossed to the other side, still says so much. Or, rather, announces it.
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Jonathan Fletcher holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts. His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, and his debut chapbook, This is My Body, was published in January 2025.