Vi Khi Nao's Review of Kim Barke's The Bean Counter
from her arboreal core
Two days ago, I finished Scientists & Poets Kim Barke’s The Bean Counter. The reading came after the heel (I mistyped originally as “heal”) of having recently read her other two very beautiful poetry collection titled Months at a Time and State to State and her Substack article: “The Scientist and Eve: Tarot, Consciousness, and the Cost of Knowing.” If you haven’t read that super breath-defying piece of hers, chop chop !
At any rate, one of the fastest ways to review a poet’s work is to interview them or so I thought. I interviewed Kim on her poetic outputs, but I made an error by sending it out and now I don’t think the interview is going to come out until October of this year—which isn’t a long time in the publishing world, but a very long time in my Substack world. So fast in a slow way. I think any interview I do from now on, I am very likely to publish here.
Kim’s The Bean Counter reminds me of Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper. It’s about a wet-bedder dude whose wife left him because he wets his bed. It goes without saying. There is a character in it: Merced de Papel who is (obviously made of paper and if you had sex with her, she would give you papercut, that sort of thing). In Kim’s book, the bean accountant falls victim to a virus called Boca, which translates to mouth in Spanish. It’s a virus with an icosahedronic mouth/stomach that consumes and that eats. And, ultimately, the virus is “slowly” turning others and the protagonists into paper:
“The same thin, flaky, white, gossamer-like material that had formed on the back of my knees was now all over the upper part of my arms,” p. 31 of The Bean Counter
There is arbitrary force of quarantinization, the inability to die in the comfort of one’s home, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the thrill of being compassionately abducted, (a little bit about beans), and the fascistic absurdity of it all. Kim seized and limned all this very poetically and mesmerizingly.
As with most things I care about, I experienced it in one breath. I read Kim’s book in a single sitting, and in that angelic ease—the simplicity of moving page to page without interruption—I could feel the full metaphor of her papering unfold. What I love about the book is Kim’s raw, inventive sense of humor and how well she captured and drew the fresh parallel between the raw materiality of books and of human existence. It’s an ode to lovers of stories (& the horror of witnessing what we love turn to ash), to preservers of printed matters, and of those who devoted their lives to archiving human contents (their memories/histories/etc) which are also books.
Most of all, I can’t imagine a more fitting/apt author for this book. Kim’s last name, Barke, instantly makes me think of tree bark, the very material from which printed books arise. It’s as if her name is quietly and profoundly writing the metaphor for us.
I hope you will spend an afternoon or two or three with Kim by getting her work here through her micropress:
https://www.scientistsandpoets.com/publications/
BIOS:
Kim Barke is a queer poet, playwright, composer, publisher, and creative director whose work defies conventional categorization. She holds a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology and an MFA in creative writing, and has worked in advertising for over 25 years, earning nine Cannes Lions among numerous other accolades. She is the author of three poetry collections, and wrote and performed Blocks of Sensation, a one-person show that premiered at Time and Space Limited in Hudson, NY and opened at the 2024 NYC Fringe Festival. Her album Claverack Winter, composed of field recordings and modular synthesis, will be released this fall.
https://kimbarke.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/kim-barke
https://www.instagram.com/kbarke/
https://www.instagram.com/scientistsandpoets/
https://www.scientistsandpoets.com/
https://www.instagram.com/scientistsandpoets
A genre-defying writer and artist, Vi Khi Nao works across poetry, fiction, theater, film, and collaborative art. A fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in 2019, she received the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize in 2022 and was named an Iowa Artist Fellow for 2024–2025. Her poetry collection Three Sapphic Movements is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in May 2027 and is currently being translated into French by Marie Gazeau.
Vi, thank you so much for your review of Kim Barke’s “The Bean Counter.” It sounds gorgeous, scary, prescient. I look forward to “inhaling it” as you describe doing, all in one sitting. And hoping for no paper cuts. I just ordered it.