Barbara Cully's poetics mix humor with a deadpan delivery, an aching love for all things tiny, the desire to face geology, the surreal, the built environment, and the horrors of human culture-with bravery. A style that treats beauty with elegy and is in love with all things shoreline, desert, and ocean.

Poet Boyer Rickel notes, "Barbara Cully's meditations in Back Apart range widely in subject and temperament: from ambushed troops in Afghanistan to the shorelines of her California youth, from Kristallnacht to our present ecological degradations. Driven by an unstable, seeking impulse, "the desire to look and to look away," the poems remain in flux, animated by a constant reckoning of self in history, in landscape, and especially among others."