Barbara Ras is the author of the poetry collections Bite Every Sorrow (LSU Press, 1998), chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award and also awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and One Hidden Stuff (Penguin, 2006). She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She lives in San Antonio, where she directs Trinity University Press.
Barbara Ras has won acclaim for fluid and graceful poems that touch on the small occurrences and mysteries of daily life in the hopes of finding the secret meaning beneath them. Both intimate and wide ranging, her work is unafraid of big subjects and big feelings, and sometimes comedic. Her third collection, The Last Skin, extends and develops these qualities, offering landscapes and characters both domestic and exotic, in poignant personal lyrics of precise description that investigate beauty, grief, death, fragility, time, and loss. Here is a poet engaged with the spirit as well as the political, blending the give and take of the world into her own ecstatic rhythms.
"Barbara Ras is one of those poets who calls the wolf out of the forest. She is both ferocious and tender, exactly what a poet should be. In The Last Skin she says she wants to be a duck and hide her iridescent head under her wing. But how could a swan so beautiful and so wise want to be a duck? And how could anyone write a poem so amazing as 'Washing the Elephant'?"
—Gerald Stern
Penguin Books
