Patrick Barron

Poet, translator, and scholar Patrick Barron grew up in the pacific northwest, moving from Montana to Connecticut, Alaska, and Oregon, holding many odd jobs, from trail builder and backcountry guide to grocery clerk and waiter to salmon processor. He spent significant years in Belfast (Northern Ireland), Ferrara (Italy), and San Francisco, and holds degrees in English and Cultural Geography. He now lives in Boston where he teaches environmental literature, poetry, and literary translation at the University of Massachusetts. 

His recent books of poetry are Spooring (Unsolicited, 2020) and Bosk (Unsolicited, 2026). Spooring is composed of interconnected texts that have their origin in a slow journey down the Apennine Mountains in central and southern Italy. The project is inspired in part by Robert Smithson’s idea that “language should find itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea in somebody’s head,” and also the corollary—that the physical world can find itself in language. Stephen Collis writes of the book: “Part transposed Basho heading south not north, part site specific artist loosing language from the material world’s medias res, Patrick Barron’s Spooring is a caress down the spine of the Apennines, weaving its way into song." Jed Rasula terms it “less text than textile, interweaving lore, observations, terrestrial coordinates and bibliographic ruminants in a carefully layered fabric all its own, in the manner of riprap. An enthralling journey by a welcome mind.” The short phenomenological poems in Bosk take cues from trees, bushes, and shrubs observed up close and from afar, playing with how the ever-mutable forms of plants can suggest overlapping forms of written and spoken languages, encouraging interlingual and intersemiotic tangents. Rebecca Kosick writes that the book "conveys the arbor-ardors of speech among species. It moves inside the names we give to nature, pulling word and branch apart for careful inspection, and drawing out the secret language that connects tree to tree, and we."

His other books include Selected Essays and Dialogues: Adventures into the Errant Familiar, by Gianni Celati; Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale; Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto; The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto; and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Rome Prize; a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award; and a Fulbright Scholarship.