Perhaps Paul Kareem Taylor said it best in his piece called On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby's American Odyssey: "Reading Barbara Hamby's poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the world we inhabit."

Barbara Hamby is the author of Holoholo, Bird Odyssey, and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Burn is her eighth book of poems. In 2010 her book of stories about Hawai'i, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the Iowa/John Simmons Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. She teaches at Florida State University, where she is distinguished university scholar, and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.