There's something about Tina Barry's writing that equips a reader to view the ordinary with a poetic lens. In brief prose and poems, through Barry's narrators' insights and candor, we find sharp humor and innocent knowing. Mall Flower dissects the human experience one everyday scene at a time, shedding light on the American experience as it feeds off the fast-food restaurants and cigarettes, the cartoons and the pop culture icons, the corner stores and linoleum led mall corridors.

With a sort of precision and attention most poets would reserve for the mapping of a butterfly wing, Barry dedicates both her short fictions and poems to something equally perplexing and full of beautiful angles and confusing symbols - she points the magnifying glass so that it reflects the sun against the sheen of plastic, the semi-precious, the hair-sprayed, fast-food fed realities that usher many of us into and out of days, years, and even decades of longing for genuine connections.