Drama
Marilyn finds herself lost in a vast, surreal desert. She falls in love with a hand Miner (Death) and must choose to live eternally in the bright lights of the male gaze or to reject Death and age as an ordinary female.
A thirteen-year-old girl named George brings home as a pet a large black snake she caugth near the Hudson River and provokes her emotionally distant, recently divorced mother Bobby.
Based on the little known of the only documented female Fool/jester in the English court, Jane Foole, a disabled beggar girl, becomes Princess, then Queen Mary Tudor's Foole and confidante.
CLEARING is about war, war between countries, ideologies, past and present, war within families, within the self. Pressured by our culture to be "warriors," the male characters in this play oppress themselves and each other and thoughtlessly appropriate cultural symbols that are not theirs to take.
Years of Sky tells of the doomed but enduring love between David, black, and Stace, white, whose relationship is bound to both Kennedy assassinations and thirty years of American politics.
Poetry
Living with You traces in lyrical, abstract verse, reminiscent of George Oppen and other poets in that tradition, the first years of the poet's married life.
Barbara Blatner's work possesses great power and great stillness. It is quiet but passionate, and the sense I have is that the processes she describes go on forever: "so we come back to / the old / the new // like the cats / in circle of[…]" She is very much a necessary poet in these loud and selfish times.
—Mac Wellman
New York Quarterly Books, 2012
Poetry, memoir
A verse memoir of my mother's death
Verse play
A verse play for Epiphany