Joseph Patrick BarrettJoseph Patrick Barrett was born in Montgomery, West Virginia, in 1950 and grew up in the mountain town of Richwood at the southern end of the Monongahela National Forest. He embraced creative writing early, and published his first book of poetry oots Deep in Sand in 1969. He entered Bethany College in 1971. The following year he was an exchange student at Oxford, where he met W.H. Auden. In 1975, he joined the Soupbean Poets at Antioch College-Appalachia in Beckley, West Virginia, and published in their magazine What's A Nice Hillbilly Like You...? and in their pivotal 1977 Soupbean Anthology. In 1978 he published his critically- acclaimed second collection of poems, Periods of Lucidity. In the 1980s, after moving to Lexington, Kentucky, he co-edited Venue, a collection of works from West Virginia and nationally known writers, was active in West Virginia Writers, and published widely in literary magazines. He studied Chinese and Japanese poets and explored the haiku and senryu forms. His work was published in numerous literary journals in Japan, Australia, and France, and he won an international haiku competition. In the later 1980s, under the influence of Rimbaud and the Surrealists, he worked on the distinctive extended form found in this collection alongside the earlier, definitive images of the Appalachian experience. His work is animated by the Japanese concept mujo, a sensitivity to life's transience. Read More Read Less