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Poetry. "Bobby Steve Baker pulls out the scalpel and cuts away the superficial and unsecured, slicing through the flesh of lust and musculature of ego until he reaches his own Numbered Bones. Choices are scars chiseled into the body. The bedrock of self is uncovered through the struggle and search for love. The wounds are perfect in their shape." - Eric Sutherland, Author of Incommunicado. Review on publisher's website

Poetry.

Poetry; chapbook.

Poems; 162 pages.

Poems, 177 pages.

Poems; 181 pages.

Poems; 221 pages.

Poems; 28 pages.

In How I Became an Angry Woman, Bianca Bargo autopsies a doomed love in razor-edged imagery "boiling with lava and venom." Here we have a man who has "eaten girls' hearts like valentine candy" and a woman who has "too many nightmares / of your old lover; / her fingers, dirty / with knowing you first." These are volcanic poems that ultimately understand how love-like the truth-is rarely pure and never simple. -Sarah Freligh

Poems, 177 pages.

Poems; 181 pages.

Poems; 221 pages.

Poems; 269 pages.

History; 92 pages, illustrations.

History, 257 pages, illustrations.

Interpreting Appalachia, Garry Barker observes, is a task that has too often fallen to outsiders, whether government missionaries, learned experts, or sensation mongers. Not surprisingly, he suggests, their accounts of the region have usually missed the essentials: "the subtle humor, quiet pain, intense pride, and bridled passion that are part of every native mountaineer". Those missing qualities are precisely the ones that Barker - who was born, reared, and educated in the mountains of Kentucky - brings to this thoughtful collection of essays. Written during the 1980s and early 1990s, these pieces are full of pointed insights into recent issues facing the region, but they are also deeply informed by a sense of the past and of the rich traditions that account for much of the Appalachian identity. Divided into four parts, "Learning", "Working", "Laughing", and "Looking", Barker's essays range from some provocative thoughts on federal arts subsidies to personal perspectives on the Appalachian crafts industries, from a moving account of a trip home for a funeral to a gently humorous definition of "head of the holler" ("It's as far back as you can go", Barker says). The result is one writer's portrait of himself and his region - a stimulating mix of opinion and reflection that always poses the pertinent question even when its answer proves elusive.

Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association, vol. 4. "Dedicated to the Memory of Harry M. Caudill, 1922-1990."

Fiction; 234 pages.

Fiction, short stories; 133 pages. Contents: Fire on the mountain.--The winner.--Switchback.--The reunion.--The hunters.--Shipping out.--The liberation of Elsie Watts.--Patton.--The burying of Webster MacFarland.--The promised land.

Fiction, short stories; 250 pages. Contents: Hellcat -- Micha's moon -- The wild dog -- Book of life -- Take two -- Big game -- The widowmister -- Mountain passage -- Elijah's gift -- Soldier boy -- Honor thy father -- Ties that bind -- Kaiser -- First time -- A smaller war -- The battle of Copperhead Creek -- My mother's miracle -- A matter of vision -- River city run -- Big deal -- Merry Christmas -- The liberation of Elsie Watts -- Liberation: second time around -- Little lost sheep.

Fiction, short stories; 186 pages. A collection of modern short stories from the heart of Appalachia.

Fiction; 164 pages.

This book is a collection of Garry Barker's "Head of the holler" columns, which have appeared regularly in several eastern Kentucky newspapers since 1988. The earlier columns collected here, whether wry observation or raucous hyperbole, fun or fanciful, angry or sentimental, are always true to his upbringing and clear and refreshing as a mountain stream.

Poetry, 45 pages. Revised edition.

This book contains biographies of Kentucky Authors written by students in a Eastern Kentucky University English Class 1994.
Named authors: Harry Brown; Billy C Clark; Janice Holt Giles; A B Guthrie, Jr.; Barbara Kingsolver; George Ella Lyon; Elizabeth Madox Roberts; James Still; Jesse Stuart; Robert Penn Warren; Irvin S Cobb; Wendell Berry; Garry Barker; Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow; James Lane Allen; James Lane Allen; Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow; Wendell Berry; Billy C Clark; Irvin S Cobb; Janice Holt Giles; A B Guthrie, Jr.; Barbara Kingsolver; George Ella Lyon; Elizabeth Madox Roberts; James Still; Jesse Stuart; Robert Penn Warren

Thirty-five years ago R. L. Barth was a Marine patrol leader in the First Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam. Today he is a poet's poet who articulates the harsh realities and ironies of war in the style of the great classical satirists. Barth writes about Vietnam, but his soldier's take on the war is startlingly applicable to the conflicts of the twenty-first century or to any war that happens to be going on. "I never once saw dying eyes / That were not stunned or shattered by surprise." That is just as it is, never mind all the dulce et decorum exhortations of politicians, who today as always clamor to kill us all. In this slender but rich collection of poems, R. L. Barth proves himself a worthy descendant of Martial and Archilochus, lobbing grenades at what Kenneth Rexroth called the Social Lie, capturing moments of grace and disgrace in combat, and locating the Homeric nobility of ordinary soldiers under fire. As he does, he honors the language. Read him, eyes wide open, and understand."--Gregory McNamee, editor of The Desert Reader "An inventive and resourceful poet. . . . very discreet . . . his lines are built out of images balanced by concepts, each giving weight to the other. . . . Poet or not, Barth was in charge of an elite fighting group that stayed out longer than other units. . . . Many died, including a friend of Barth's memorialized in 'Elegy for a Dead Friend, ' one of the best war poems in English."--Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

Poetry; 20 pages.

Poetry. The Vietnam War happened a long time ago in a place far away. For an entire generation, those known as Boomers, it was one of the most defining events of the age, certainly for all those who fought in it, but also for those who protested against it, and for those who watched it nightly on their TV screens, the first time war was witnessed by the general public in real time, with body counts served alongside the evening meal. It has been the subject of countless books, movies, and documentaries. Why, then, should we read about it now? The poet R. L. Barth, who as a young Marine experienced the war first-hand, responds, "Because it's truth. Because it's history." History often is the most inconvenient of truths, forcing us to acknowledge what we would prefer to forget, or to remember a different way. And history, we are told, is written by the victors. But the greatest truth of war is that it can never be understood unless it is told by its victims. In Barth's poems, victims are given voice. Those who fought, those who died, those who returned wounded and shattered in body and mind, not to parades as heroes, but to a country that too often victimized them a second time, and would not acknowledge their service until many years later. His poems are often short, bursting with the power of ordnance, like that recounted in "One Way to Carry the Dead," which reads in its entirety: "A huge shell thundered; he was vaporized / And, close friends breathing near, internalized." They convey, with elegant efficiency, the horrors and absurdities of war. And this is most important reason that we need these poems. Barth opens with a quote from George Gascoigne, "That Warre seems sweete to such as raunge it not." As long as war "seems sweete," we will forget, and thus repeat, the horror. Thus, as Pound had it, this is "news that stays news," a lesson to be endlessly repeated until, at last, it may be learned. Until then, we are left with a black slab of memory, "Up Against the Wall:" "These dead troops gave their country fame, / Which country travestied their story. / Now, only kin recall each name; / Only the dead recall their glory."

Poetry; 14 unnumbered pages.

Poetry; 47 pages. "An edition limited to two hundred, printed by Harry Duncan on Kochi paper from Bembo and Romulus types at The University of Nebraska at Omaha Fine Arts Press during April and May 1985"--Colophon.

Poetry.

"A retrospective anthology"--Cover.

Poetry; 15 pages.

Poetry; 19 pages. "This book has been printed in an edition of 200 copies. Twenty-five copies include an otherwise unpublished poem handwritten by the author and are signed by the author and artist."--Colophon.

Poems; 73 pages.

Bibliography; 28 pages.

Poetry; [24] pages. Includes contributions from Jeffrey Akard, Bob Barth, Edgar Bowers, Dick Davis, Suzanne J. Doyle, Charles Gullans, Thom Gunn, Warren Hope, Janet Lewis, Helen Pinkerton, and Timothy Steele.
Publisher's name and date of publication from title page verso.

Personal Correspondence. "This pamphlet has been published in an edition of one hundred twenty-five copies. Fifteen have been numbered and signed by the editor. 3/15"--Colophon.

"Poet, teacher and critic, Yvor Winters, was a man of letters in more ways than one. This selection of his personal correspondence spans half a century of literary history and a lifetime of intellectual development and growth. As a record of a serious artist and thinker's grappling with important issues and, sometimes, with his notable friends, the letters offer a new and often unexpected insight into the creative mind at work." "Rich with Winters's personal impressions and honest appraisals and addressed to a panoply of poets, writers, and editors, including Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, Lincoln Kirstein, Louise Bogan, and Katherine Anne Porter among others, The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters offers that unique glimpse of a writer of stature in private conversation with his peers."--Jacket.

Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems. With the publication of her selected poems, Swallow Press celebrates the distinguished career of one of its most cherished authors. Critics as disparate as Kenneth Rexroth, Timothy Steele, Theodore Roethke, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Dana Gioia have sung the praises of her work over the decades. Her career as a poet was remarkable not only for its longevity but also for the fact that even well into her tenth decade she wrote poems that stand with her very best work. Characterized by the vigor and sharpness of her images and the understated lyricism that permeates her rhythmic lines, The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis is a survey of modern poetry unto itself.

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a friend, colleague, and teacher to poets of several generations from Hart Crane and Allen Tate to J. V. Cunningham, Turner Cassity, and Edgar Bowers to Robert Hass, Philip Levine, and Robert Pinsky. This retrospective of one hundred poems, edited by the poet and publisher R. L. Barth, is compiled from Winters's published and unpublished work and features an introductory overview of his life and career by Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, a former student of Winters's and a distinguished scholar of American literature.

Poetry; 24 pages.

"Much madness is divinest sense," wrote Emily Dickinson, "And much sense the starkest madness." The idea that poetry and madness are deeply intertwined, and that madness sometimes leads to the most divine poetry, has been with us since antiquity. In his critical and clinical introduction to this splendid anthology--the first of its kind--psychiatrist and poet Mark S. Bauer considers mental disorders from multiple perspectives and challenges us to broaden our outlook. He has selected more than 200 poems from across seven centuries that reflect a wide range mental states--from despondency and despair to melancholy, mania, and complete submersion into a world of heightened, original perception. Featuring such poets as George Herbert, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Weldon Kees, Lucille Clifton, Jane Kenyon, and many others, A Mind Apart has much to offer those who suffer from mental illness, those who work to understand it, and all those who value the poetry that has come to us from the heights and depths of human experience. Includes poems by Kentucky poet Robert L. Barth.

A rare bone cancer robbed Jarrett Mynear of a normal childhood when he was two years old, but it didn't steal his spirit. The Joy Cart is the story of how an extraordinary boy captivated crowds with his courage, faith and humor in the face of adversity. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Jarrett got busy. By delivering thousands of toys to sick children, this pint-sized Santa Claus traveled a path that led to national television appearances, prestigious awards and a chance meeting with the President of the United States.

A rare bone cancer robbed Jarrett Mynear of a normal childhood when he was two years old, but it didn't steal his spirit. This extraordinary boy captivated crowds with his courage, faith, and humor in the face of adversity. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Jarrett got busy. By delivering thousands of toys to sick children, the pint-sized Santa Claus traveled a path that led to national television appearances, prestigious awards, and a chance meeting with the President of the United States. This is the true story of a little boy's legacy and how, nearly two decades after his death, he continues to inspire small acts of kindness and huge acts of philanthropy.

What kind of woman dances naked for money? Bernadette Barton takes us inside countless strip bars and clubs, from upscale to back road as well as those that specialize in lap dancing, table dancing, topless only, and peep shows, to reveal the startling lives of exotic dancers. Originally published in 2006, the product of years of first-hand research in strip clubs around the country, Stripped is a classic portrait of what it's like for those who choose to strip as a profession. Barton explores why women begin stripping, the initial excitement and financial rewards of the work, the dangers of the life--namely, drugs and prostitution--and, inevitably, the difficulties in staying in the business over time, especially for their relationships, sexuality and self-esteem. In this completely revised and updated edition, Barton returns to the strip clubs she originally studied to observe the major changes in the industry that have occurred over the last decade. She examines how "raunch culture" affects exotic dancers' treatment by their clientele, who are now accustomed to seeing nudity and sexualized performance in accessible, R and X -rated media from a variety of outlets, particularly the Internet. Barton explores how new media has transformed exotic dancing, allowing dancers to build an online brand, but also introducing possibilities for customers to take unauthorized nude photos and videos of the entertainers.. And finally, Barton speaks to new dancers as well as dancers she interviewed in the previous edition, examining how the toll of stripping still impacts the lives of exotic dancers in a changing industry. Incorporating new scholarship, new observations, and increased awareness of emerging media technology, Barton brings a fresh and important perspective on the challenges that women face working in the still-thriving world of exotic dancing.

Discover the complex work and personal experiences of women in the exotic dancing industry What kind of woman dances naked for money? Bernadette Barton takes us inside countless strip bars and clubs, from upscale to back road as well as those that specialize in lapdancing, table dancing, topless only, or peep shows, to reveal the startling lives of exotic dancers. Based on over five years of research and from visiting clubs around the country, particularly in San Francisco, Hawaii, and Kentucky, Stripped offers a rare portrait of not just how dancers get into the business but what it's like for those who choose to strip year after year. Through captivating interviews and first-hand observation, Barton recounts why these women began stripping, the initial excitement and financial rewards from the work, the dangers of the life--namely, drugs and prostitution--and, inevitably, the difficulties in staying in the business over time, especially for their sexuality and self-esteem. Stripped provides fresh insight into the complex work and personal experiences of exotic dancers, one that goes beyond the "sex wars" debate to offer an important new understanding of sex work.

2013 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, LGBT Studies category In the Bible Belt, it's common to see bumper stickers that claim One Man + One Woman = Marriage, church billboards that command one to "Get right with Jesus," letters to the editor comparing gay marriage to marrying one's dog, and nightly news about homophobic attacks from the Family Foundation. While some areas of the Unites States have made tremendous progress in securing rights for gay people, Bible Belt states lag behind. Not only do most Bible Belt gays lack domestic partner benefits, lesbians and gay men can still be fired from some places of employment in many regions of the Bible Belt for being a homosexual. In Pray the Gay Away, Bernadette Barton argues that conventions of small town life, rules which govern Southern manners, and the power wielded by Christian institutions serve as a foundation for both passive and active homophobia in the Bible Belt. She explores how conservative Christian ideology reproduces homophobic attitudes and shares how Bible Belt gays negotiate these attitudes in their daily lives. Drawing on the remarkable stories of Bible Belt gays, Barton brings to the fore their thoughts, experiences and hard-won insights to explore the front lines of our national culture war over marriage, family, hate crimes, and equal rights. Pray the Gay Away illuminates their lives as both foot soldiers and casualties in the battle for gay rights.

Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Kentucky. Abstract and vita bound with copy.

Article. Published in Gender & Society, 16(2002):5, s.585-602.