by Rick Barot
The poems in Rick Barot’s third collection, Chord, complicate and expand each other: the speakers’ memories and experiences quickly ripple out into the historical, global, and political. Throughout, Chord posits the lyric as a form of excavation, or disinterring, unraveling personal and global history into collective memory. Barot’s poems move forward to go backward, in search of some primeval, primary stateāas his speaker says in the end, “I want from love only the beginning.