Irish American poet Greg Rappleye reads from his latest full-length collection of poetry, Barley Child.

 

This collection is drawn from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials over four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed.

 

The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism. Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that rarely mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Rappleye as a poet of witness and importance.

 

Rappleye teaches in the English Department of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a former Bread Loaf Fellow and has published five full-length collections of poetry and several chapbooks. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Arts & Letters Prize, and the 2021 Fish Prize in Poetry, selected by Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States.

 

Rappleye has been published widely in the United States and in Ireland, and his work has also been presented on RTE Radio 1, Irish Public Radio. Barley Child, his fifth collection of poetry, won the Miller Williams Prize in Poetry, selected by the distinguished poet and editor Patricia Smith, and was published in 2025 by the University of Arkansas Press.

 

Rappleye reads from Barley Child on Sunday at 1:00pm in Room 111.

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