Which Will Change the Other More? by Barbara Boches

In Which Will Change the Other More? with humanity and dignity, Barbara Boches renders encounters between cultures.  These meetings take place in a variety of settings: outside a silk shop in China, in church basements where the speaker teaches ESOL to immigrants and survivors, at a hardware supply company during the swelter of a Florida summer, among others. In each scene the poet records without judgment both moments of connection and moments of missed connections.  In “The Asylum Seeker,” for example, as the speaker struggles to overcome her resistance to accept her student’s painful story, she acknowledges “Our wall, only in part//from different tongues. Other/bricks are mine,” and bears witness as the woman “sinks from chair/to floor, her fist like a silent/gavel, up and down.” These finely crafted poems all ask, “which will change the other more?” and demand that we be open-hearted and courageous enough to entertain that question without rushing toward an answer.

–Kathleen Aguero, author of After That, poetry faculty at Solstice low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

A boundary breaking work, Which Will Change the Other More, homes in on a Beijing alley silk spinner, an urban women’s shelter, into the life of a 12^th century Chinese divorcee poet, middle school purgatory, and chases down a parrot and runaway “who reeked/ of Marlboros and elephant craps.” Boches, a free verse poet, works in a few brilliantly executed hybrid formats, including a metamorphic pantoum, a play/poem in three acts, and multilingual poems that know no borders. It begins “in a basement/ garden of sorts,” and ends staring at a WWII “beach with Patton’s/ men” snapshot with her closeted uncle on his deathbed murmuring that “Sex isn’t/ important at my age.” Marvin Bell said that “poetry is a mature art.” Linda Pastan said that poets in their middle years write brilliantly of childhood. Boches is a poet of the first order who can tackle anything. This collection is the reason I read poetry.

–Roger Weingarten, author of The Four Gentlemen and Their Footman, Premature Elegy by Firelight