From yoga to pomegranates to sandwiches, from the Piggly Wiggly checkout to Iraq to the day of one's own death, the poems of Barbara Hagerty's The Guest House perform the most serious work of poetry in places familiar and strange. They welcome and entertain all visitors with empathy, wisdom, and comfort.

Dan Albergotti, author of The Boatloads
 

Barbara Hagerty writes poems to embrace an everyday world that could never define them—or her. Dreams, memories, and intimations of mortality inspire her to discover "the next perfect day/of moving words around/like the lightest of furniture."

Gilbert Alien, author of Body Parts
 

Barbara Hagerty, in The Guest House, takes up the cause of "castoffs and tatters," inviting us into her fascination with reckoning what others have neglected or overlooked; in some cases, a thing has outlived its owner but not its use. Whatever its original fate, our generous speaker finds a new home for it—whether it be 'Tjeraniums/in slow motion" or the neighbor who never speaks or crows "in their black academic gowns"—in these thoughtful, well-wrought poems. Could the world be just this capacious? She's convinced me it is.

Carol Ann Davis, author of Psalm
 

Reading this skillful suite of poems is like wandering through Charleston on a spring day and gradually realizing that nothing is quite what it seems. A grocer is a "tall dwarf," a gatekeeper in a garden is Carl Jung; words and even time sway as if they were fluid. And language is fluid and alive with image and music in this well-conceived and moving chapbook.

Richard Garcia, author The Persistence of Objects

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Barbara G. S. Hagerty is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, whose essays, columns, and poems have appeared in a wide variety of national and regional periodicals. She has also written two books   (Purse Universe, Crane Hill Publishers and Handbags, Running Press) that examine the cultural meanings and metaphors inherent in the bags we carry.  

A member of the Long Table Poets, a biweekly workshop led by Richard Garcia, she has also worked as a photographer, curator, and teacher of poetry and creative non-fiction. She holds an M.A. in degree in Creative Writing from The Johns Hopkins University.