Race, sex, infidelity

Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years is billed as a “novel in prose poems.” Each section in this love story, set in Berkeley in the ’60s, carries the narrative forward, but does so by fully describing a single moment of it. A married white high-school teacher at an integrated school gets involved in an affair with a black colleague. That would be complicated enough, but there is so much more in this novella about race and sex and the muddle we make trying to understand each other across color and gender lines. How do you break down barriers in some areas and not in others? In Barker’s case, you do it by writing poetry: using the best possible word in the best possible way, and leaving out anything self-protective in favor of raw and direct. Barker will read from Nothing Between Us at the Avid Reader in Davis, 617 Second Street, at 5 p.m. on Sunday, February 7.