Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable. In poems such as “Six, Sex, Say,” she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife “with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit” in “Flesh, Bone, and Red,” to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in “Ode on My Mother's Handwriting.” Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and “orangutans in the guise of men.” As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems “are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive.” *Starred Review* Hamby, an award-winning poet as remarkable for her pep and juiciness as for her Whitmanesque inclusiveness, is mad for the "the dark drug of words." In her third exhilarating collection, she takes the mockingbird, that gifted imitator, as her mentor in a dazzling set of poems titled "The Mockingbird Blues," but Hamby is also a bit of a magpie, collecting odds and ends as she swoops through the sanctuaries of myth, art, and literature, and the flea market of pop culture. At once full of sass and formally brilliant--her ingeniously constructed poems are supersonic yet stop on a dime--Hamby is philosophical, sexy, and very funny. She writes of Paris and the Deep South, of bubble gum and Hieronymus Bosch, movies and the marquis de Sade, of the conga line of selves that make up a life, rock and roll, idolatry, and war. Hamby conjures up Babel but writes with breathtaking clarity, dispelling cacophony and diving right down into the funkiness of life and the wonder of existence. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Hamby's poems resemble spells, words cascading like Flora's flowers. The result in a break-necking pace, and it is almost miraculous that this collection does not spin out of control. . . . These poems are tender, humble, and often humorous. . . . This collection does pack a punch. ― ForeWord Magazine There's no question that these are witty poems, oftentimes reminscent of the electric, frenzied hilarity of watching Robin Williams at his coked-out best. . . . A challenging book, one that thrusts us into the superconductor of a post-modern mind, that threatens, at times, to overwhelm us with its abundance of reference points, but which never becomes unclear, never forsakes meaning for the sake of its verbal inventiveness. This is not only Hamby's best book, but one that marks, I believe, a major poetic achievement. It's a book that dazzles and energizes, that challenges and comforts, as it celebrates and mourns 'our cries of Bigger, faster, more, more, more.' ― Missouri Review "Barbar a Hamby's Babel is just that―a wild confluence of words almost inundated by its barely restrained verbal enthusiasms. Funky, erudite, obsessively referential, and wild with listing, her poems orgiastically invite us to hurl ourselves into them."―Billy Collins ― Billy Collins Babel is a word-lover's romp, a cultural historian's playground. Hamby can be as inclusive as Goldbarth, as intelligently zany as Frank O'Hara. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer's notion of a good time. ― Stephen Dunn Hamby's poems have a jumping verve and forward drive. She knows American life and language with exuberant precision and links them to the popular culture, high art, and languages of many of other countries, all of this in a prfoundly assured, resourceful, inventive and unifying voice. ― Tar River Poetry Winner of the Donald Hall Prize in PoetryBarbara Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers. "Babel is a word-lover's romp, a cultural historian's playground. Hamby can be as inclusive as Goldbarth, as intelligently zany as Frank O'Hara. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer's notion of a good time."-Stephen Dunn "Barbara Hamby's Babel is just that-a wild confluence of words almost inundated by its barely restrained verbal enthusiasms. Funky, erudite, obsessively referential, and wild with listing, her poems orgiastically invite us to hurl ourselves into them."-Bi