Barbara Hamby is the author of Delirium, which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and the Kate Tufts Award; and The Alphabet of Desire, which won the New York University Poetry Prize and was chosen as one of the twenty-five best books of 1999 by the New York City Public Library. She teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

About Babel:

"Babel is a word-lover's romp, a cultural historian's playground. Hamby can be as inclusive as Goldbarth, as intelligently zany as Frank O'Hara. This is poetry that energizes, that dares to give us a high-wire performer's notion of a good time."
—Stephen Dunn

"Barbara Hamby's Babel is just that-a wild confluence of words almost inundated by its barely restrained verbal enthusiasms. Funky, erudite, obsessively referential, and wild with listing, her poems orgiastically invite us to hurl ourselves into them."
—Billy Collins

"Here is an imagination so free-ranging, philosophically inquisitive, humorous, and sharp, that in a rhapsody on pink it seamlessly connects the invention of bubblegum to Bosch, to moveable type to the drive to create—and so much earthly delight along the way. She is as emotionally resonant as she is dazzling."
—Aliki Barnstone

Other poems by Barbara Hamby in Verse Daily:
January 30, 2003:  "Ode on Satan's Power" "At a local bistro's Christmas sing-along, the new..."