Hands in Clay

A radical, radiant melancholy is the light that comes from Mildred Kiconco Barya's poems. Moonlight, hellfire, komorebi - 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.

-Bruce Smith, Spill

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 this 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 veil, if not vale." 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.

-Aditi Machado, Material Witness

Passing effortlessly through the thin membrane that separates the real from the fantastical, Mildred Kiconco Barya's Hands in Clay 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.

-Christopher Kennedy, The Strange God Who Makes Us