I read Moving the Bones heart quaking, humbled, and held in thrall by Rick Barot’s tender yet rigorous attention. An old lover’s marginalia, Rembrandt’s middle-aged self-portrait, mason jars filled with rice, gulls like scissors in flight: each and all are observed with the clear-eyed vision of prayer. But Barot is not merely investigating the spirit, he is engaging intimately with time—the objects, images, and bodies that make our time on earth so poignant and specific and, at the same time, measure mortal time’s brevity. Such patient, masterful looking—for Barot’s attention is above all visionary—testifies to the fearless intelligence and emotion of these poems. Moving the Bones is a book of great daring and even greater vulnerability.

—Jennifer Chang  

The poems in Moving the Bones are restless and reflective, always suggesting the deep currents of a brilliant mind at work or the urgent intimacy of a whispered voice. Here, Barot mourns the passage of life, the irretrievability of the past, the vagaries of memory. Here, he offers the most exquisite and personal meditations on the pandemic, on isolation, and on ethical thought. “I sat in that room,” he tells us, “writing toward the bright new world I am always trying to write into.” I am so glad he has taken us with him.  Rick Barot is certainly one of the most gifted poets of his—of our—generation.

—Kevin Prufer