A new translation of two key works by the renowned twentieth-century poet includes Sonnets to Orpheus, a reflection of the writer's deep reverence for nature; and Duino Elegies, a meditation on human impermanence and its link to all life and times. 15,000 first printing.

In Praise of Mortality

Literature & Fiction

Macy, Joanna

Barrows, Anita

Poetry

Riverhead Hardcover

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/WEST TRANSLATION AWARD The 100th Anniversary Edition of a global classic, containing beautiful translations along with the original German text. While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hours tells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being. These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Religion & Spirituality

Riverhead Books

A new translation of two key works by the renowned twentieth-century poet includes Sonnets to Orpheus, a reflection of the writer's deep reverence for nature, and Duino Elegies, a meditation on human impermanence and its link to all life and times. Reprint.

Riverhead Trade

With If Not Now Anita Barrows posits that one cannot bear witness from a safe distance, that, to do it properly, one must join in the bloodletting. These poems foreground an oft-overlooked truth about structural violence—poverty, displacement, and police shootings. It is a bomb that detonates in our communities, whose blast radius extends well beyond the body lying lifeless in the street. They remind us that the only way to transcend this violence, to repair that which has been broken, is through connection.\n—Zach Wyner, Author of What We Never Had\nAnita Barrows is a poet of the morning and the future. Her poems in If Not Now are songs to life and hope. They offer the reader a subtle embrace from a poet whose own work is inspired, it seems to me, both by her translations—with Joanna Macy—of Rilke, and her day-to-day engagement with the real world as a psychotherapist working with very troubled children in a world exploding with challenges.\n—Dennis J Bernstein, award-winning poet, author of Five Oceans in a Teaspoon\nAnita Barrows lets us see ourselves in the hidden sorrows and heroic acts of everyday. These poems reveal that a brave rebellious heart can transform the world.\n—Joanna Macy, activist and author of Active Hope

If Not Now ...

Kelsay Books

Gracie is a serious, sensitive, aspiring writer; Jannie, her autistic younger sister, is passionate about birds. As children, they were taken by their mother on a senseless trip through Europe that ended in their mother’s suicide. Now, in Berkeley, their father works tirelessly to find ways to engage Jannie, while Gracie—unwilling to reveal the truth about her mother’s suicide or her sister’s autism to anyone outside her family—weaves a web of lies around herself that isolate her even as Jannie, in part through her relationships with and understanding of birds, begins to speak, interact, and emerge.\nNarrated by Gracie and alternating back and forth between 2002, when the sisters are still children/adolescents, and 2017, when they are in their early adulthood, The Language of Birds is a story of coming to understand what seems unfamiliar and indecipherable, and of finding authentic ways to be with the people you love.

The Language of Birds: A Novel

Literary

She Writes Press

The poems in Anita Barrows’ We Are the Hunger take us to a place Seamus Heaney speaks of—where the frontier of nightmare meets the frontier of language. Reading her is like passing through an energy field where you come out sheened from a language where horror and loss are transformed by the fire of imagination and the healing music of poetry. She is both a political poet of witness and a lyric poet of stunning luminous moments; when these merge, we have a kind of poetry that is so necessary for our time, a vision of the whole. If there is loss there is also hope: “not to remain so long in sorrow/that we neglect to dwell also/in gladness.” Throughout her work she keeps alive the idea of individual responsibility in an age of relativism. Her voice is strong and unequivocal. “Let the words of our mouths / be as flame / rising from ruined lands, flame / rising from flame, undiminished.” These are essential poems, poems you want to live with, poems that help you live. —Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World 
 The opening poem of this book asks us to confront the fire of Dante’s Purgatory – on the other side of which is Beatrice, his heart’s desire. We Are the Hunger is haunted by beauty and dissolution, by the natural world and the cries of birds and insects, by the human world and its song of destruction. Graves everywhere, “always / wars going on,” but also “cornstalks swaying in the last hot wind of August.” And the fire of hope. —Alicia Ostriker, author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog. 
 An extraordinary collection. Truth telling, and truly pitched, resonant poems telling intimate and necessary stories set in the harshest landscapes of our times, with insight and compassion. —Susan Griffin, author of A Chorus of Stones

We are the Hunger

Anita Barrows situates herself in these poems at the center of grief, transience, and beauty. She moves seamlessly from the glory of a summer day in the Sierra to the death of a beloved backyard tree to the horror of a refugee camp. But it is her voice that carries us, a voice that sobs as she sings and sings as she sobs. Years of perfecting her craft yield an effortless-seeming music that leads us to view our broken, burning world just as it is while still affirming the new grasses / rising abundant from rainsoaked earth / though ruin / be all around us.—David Shaddock, Author of The Book of Splendor and Poetry and Psychoanalysis We sang and we laughed as night overtook us, as the helicopters of the Occupation kept circling, circling. Anita Barrows, poet, translator, distinguished trauma psychologist, has delivered a breathtaking work in Testimony. These poems braid together the terrible dailyness of war—Barrows has served war-traumatized children across the world—with moments of quiet happiness: the scent of Jeffrey pine, sleep sounds of beloved dogs, coffee, and warm bread.This work is brilliantly antiphonal. The raised whip of the world falls relentlessly (“Gunfire . . . who’s missing?”); yet, in a city bombed to rebar, a fruit tree remains, its petals pink and white. Here, the sensual beauty of nature restores a ruptured world to eros; and moments of human tenderness fortify. For Barrows, las luchas de cada dia (the struggles of every day) “must yet be accompanied by joy.” The poet of Testimony is, in the tradition of Whitman, both witness and wound dresser.—Dawn McGuire, Author of American Dream with Exit WoundDenise Levertov once wrote that the most awesome moments of radiant joy should acknowledge their context of icy shadows. Anita Barrows’ brilliant new odes exquisitely balance the bright light of Sierra watersheds with the bullet-pocked rubble of the Middle East. From the world’s medley of disasters and birdsong, she rescues vivid details that inspire both joy and awareness in us.—Peter Dale Scott, Author of Minding the Darkness, Poetry and Terror, and The Road to 911

TESTIMONY

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Books by Barrows, Anita

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Barrows, Anita. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

In Praise of Mortality

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

In Praise of Mortality

If Not Now ...

The Language of Birds: A Novel

We are the Hunger

TESTIMONY