Simple Machines

About Barbara Duffey

Barbara Duffey is a 2015 NEA Literature Fellow in poetry and author of the collection I Might Be Mistaken as well as the chapbooks The Circus of Forgetting and The Verge of Thirst. Her poems appear in such publications as Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and Best New Poets 2009, and her prose in CutBank and The Collagist. An assistant professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, she holds a PhD from the University of Utah and an MFA from the University of Houston.

Praise for Simple Machines

Who would have believed that machines could be so sexy, that “a piston in its shaft” would make us blush? Barbara Duffey gives not only life to machines, but eroticism and pathos, or, rather, she uses machines to reveal those essential qualities in us. And she does this in language so extraordinarily acute and precise that we might be tempted to think her poems are themselves, machines, except for the fact that each is so eccentric, so singular, so movingly and exquisitely human.
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of The Hoopoe’s Crown

Duffey’s Simple Machines is a marvelously inventive, linguistically dexterous paean to bio/mechanical reproduction in all of its various incarnations. In stunningly welded lines glitteringly bolted together with shimmering nuts of words, Duffey, as cyborg poet, assembles cyborgian poems-as-machines that take on themes of creation, (re)production, and invention—smartly repurposing them as forms of yearning, procedure, and imagination ignited by both mystery and electricity.
—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians and Year of the Snake

There is nothing simple about Simple Machines—except perhaps the withering statements that strike ache into the heart, or the images that haunt us after reading Duffey’s gorgeous words. These poems take Pound at his word when he entreats the poet to consider the ways of the scientist. These “fair engines” both reinvent and re-patent the world anew, one where the body is “a fox-draw, primitive milkground,” and where the speaker can “rock sorrow out.” Duffey’s kinetic lyricism, her wiry intelligence, her sumptuous wit all dare “to ask the dismantlers to give me quarter, / a rudder in the earthquaking, splashed-up future.” All I ask is to live in that future, with these burnished, beautiful poems.
—James Allen Hall, author of Now You’re the Enemy and winner of the Lambda Award

How does a poet reinvent the body? In language, of course—and if she’s Barbara Duffey, she reinvents the body as machine, or rather machines, just as she reinvents machines as bodies. At the heart of this book is the most emotion-laden human dilemma: infertility and the longing for a child that makes the “simple machine” of the book’s title anything but, since the machine fails at what should be its automatic, even its natural, function. Yet technology intervenes—and at last, whether Duffey is playing with the OED or asking the reader to fold words into a poem, this book in which everything acts as a machine, even a kitchen, even a page, even a womb, is as full of pleasure and wit as of pain.
—Katherine Coles, author of Flight and The Earth Is Not Flat