If Not Now ...

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