This book pays tribute to the literary relationship, mutuality of influence, and companionship of writers Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver, a relationship cut short by Carver's death in 1988. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner is able to carry forward the life and work of her spouse, while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors.

In essays, letters, and interviews written after her husband's untimely death, Gallagher explores the inextricable bonds that linked their lives and their writing. The book opens with excerpts from a journal of the couple's last trip to Europe, and a selection of Gallagher's introductions to Carver's posthumous collections.

The next section focuses primarily on Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," a film based on Carver's short stories, and provides a rare, quietly dramatic look a poet in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. The collection concludes with interviews that touch upon the poet's grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer's life, and the ways in which her relationship to Carver has continued to evolve, even after death.

Tess Gallagher's poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of short-story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.