Review: I Tell Henrietta by Tina Barry

reviewed by Jen Knox

Tina Barry’s poetry collection, I Tell Henrietta, sticks to the ribs. The slim collection includes nine illustrations by the artist Kristin Flynn to offer readers an ekphrastic experience. The first poem, in fact, begins with our narrator—a young girl—drawing.

My Year of Drawing Swans 

When the need to render a beak lived inside me, 
I’d swing one arm around a subway pole, 
press the lead point of the pencil into the notebook
I carried. 

A dark dot launched the curve of hard bill. Between its eyes, 
the black knob, gateway to the swoosh of neck. 
Stashes of swan studies filled the drawer of my bedside table. 

I’d wake to the sky slouching off its cape and label their parts, 
a new language I couldn’t stop writing: lore, nares. Covert: 
its ledge of wings; the serrated lamella surrounding its tongue. 
At jobs I loathed, I’d peek at torn pieces stuffed into folders; 
darken a wing, shadow the water. 

Once I had perfected the dusty diamond
of its foot, the center digit so real I could feel
its scalloped ridges with my finger, 
I stood in the subway, poised to draw, 
but the swans never returned to me.

As the book progresses, the girl grows. There’s a steady progression from fantasy to realization to pain and beyond. There’s a mysterious relationship that takes the form of confessions. There’s the symbol of a swan, a deer, mermaids, and even the rage of Judge Judy who shows up in dreams. There is judgment and resilience and a steady watchfulness in these poems that kept me reading them the same way I might the stories of a close friend, wondering what is next in this odd chronology. 

To sit back and write a review, a thing I rarely do lately, I kept thinking of Campbell’s archetypes, Jung’s The Red Book, and the call of a close narrative to return to certain scenes that seemed raised questions about human perception and intention that we often forget.

One of my favorite poems, an earned poem (there is great beauty to read all that precedes it, then reread the poem itself) that I have the author’s permission to share here nudged me to read and reread to tease out how I fully felt. This is the work of a skilled poet.  

In The Tattoo Shop,

I sat before a wall of images: cartoon characters and geisha girls, swans
and dragonflies, hearts broken and mended. The artist and I pondered 
possible designs: a four-leaf clover for a wrist, a goldfish to be hidden 
in a knee’s dimpled flesh. We decided on the word “rose” to be etched
beneath a small pink bud on an ankle. 

When I laid my infant daughter on the table and held her leg steady, the
artist peered down at her trusting face in the bright light, and switched
off the inking needle. “I can’t,” she said. “Please take her and go.”

Tina Barry captures, with her crisp images and vivid imagery, a journey through the archetypes. We follow a girl who begins with delightful innocence as she breaks and rebuilds, sees what steals innocence, then claims it back, tests the limits of relationships, finds romance and friendship, and ultimately becomes a woman whose narrative fades into that of the next generation. 

Buy Barry’s book here.

Tina Barry's third full-length collection I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher Press, Inc.) was published in August 2024. She is the author of Mall Flower, poems and short fiction (Big Table Publishing, 2016) and Beautiful Raft, prose poems based on the lives of Virginia Haggard, the artist Marc Chagall's lover, and Haggard's daughter Jean McNeil (Big Table, 2019). Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including Rattle, Verse Daily, The Best Short Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016. The American Poetry Journal, Lascaux Review, Flash-Frontier, SWWIM, Mom Egg Review, Gyroscope, The Third River, Yes Poetry, Sky Island Journal, Nixes Mate, A Constellation of Kisses anthology, Nasty Women Poets, Feckless Cunt, Exposure: An Anthology of Microfiction, and Veils, Halos and Shackles: Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. In 2023, Barry's essay "Hosed" was chosen by Writersread.org to be performed at the City Winery in NYC. Tina's poems have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and she has several Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominations. She teaches poetry and fiction at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com. Barry received a M.F.A. in creative writing from Long Island University, Brooklyn, in 2014. She lives in upstate New York.