2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist Book Launch Details! The Marvelous Real by Tess Barry

2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist

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Book Launch Event: January 3, 4:30 p.m.
Carlow University, Gailliot Center

In The Marvelous Real, Tess Barry illuminates the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary mystery and majesty of life, love, death, family, and the ghostly world beyond. With precise, vivid language, Barry renders a reality that is always more than meets the eye, always shifting and deepening our perception of the known and unknown. Barry invites readers into a lyrical world of joy, wonder, loss, humor, and human connection. The Marvelous Real is a journey in sound, rhythm, and imagery—from a mother as Walden Pond, to déjà vu in Old San Juan, to a childhood game of old church lady bank robbers, a work from Picasso’s Blue Period, and a brother’s hands. These poems illustrate the power of language to embody and transcend human experience. Barry’s debut is indeed a marvelous real.

Tess Barry was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. Twice a finalist for North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and Aesthetica Magazine’s Poetry Award, she has also been shortlisted four times for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her work has been widely published in the US and abroad and has appeared in journals, such as: Aesthetica, The Compass Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Cordella Magazine, Mslexia, The Louisville Review, North American Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Stinging Fly, among others. Barry holds an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Carlow University and an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the Director of Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, a low residency program in the US and Ireland.

What Readers are Saying:
The Marvelous Real is the perfect title for this inspiring collection. Real, because it graces the many seemingly ordinary moments of our lives, transfixing them into the extraordinary, and marvelous, because Barry guides us on a magical, dream-like journey through the many sublime spaces/places her poetic soul has witnessed, imagined, or desired. All this conveyed through a musicality that
soothes us into our truest selves.
—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body

These poems touch on the magic and mystery of childhood mixed with the serene undercurrent of nature and observations from a growing transcendence of the very world we understand as real. In these poems you can’t get lost, only found.
—Sheila Carter-Jones, author of Every Hard Sweetness

Emptied of all but wildness, Tess Barry’s poetry lets the energy of life flood across the page: a mother as Walden Pond, a sailor on a bus to Atlantic City, the loneliness of J. D. Salinger, the edgy Irish diaspora, all her essences of being alive transform the reader, reminding us that “My whole life has been ripe with wild fruit.” The Marvelous Real is a major achievement in Irish-American poetry.
—Thomas McCarthy, Irish author of Pandemonium and Plenitude

Tess Barry celebrates being alive in The Marvelous Real. These are poems to treasure, to read and reread, a poet immersed in and enchanted by language.
—Jean O’Brien, Irish author of Stars Burn Regardless

Tess Barry’s The Marvelous Real is a paean to the small, seemingly ordinary moments of our lives—infusing these moments with magic, wonder, and a capacious gratitude in which the real is, indeed, rendered exceedingly marvelous. These are earthy poems filled with tenderness, humor, and the imagination of a glorious mind. The Marvelous Real is a sensual and stunningly beautiful debut.
—Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, author of Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50