—James Harms

“The neighborhood was at war with itself again,” writes Marc Harshman in his beautiful, somber new work, Woman in Red Anorak. Indeed, one of the salient features of this book is its neighborliness, not in the conventional sense, but, because Harshman, like Whitman, enters and inhabits a multitude of voices and situations, the lives of many overcome by tragedy are brought together. “The soldiers have marched/without a word about/their fatal and private horizons,” he writes in one poem. In another, a young girl commits suicide, and, in a third, a refu­gee asks, “What had become of them? The fish? The doves? The river?/The children?” There are no comforting answers in this sobering, absorbing work, but there is the fierce courage and honesty to ask the questions.

—Lynn Emanuel

I have admired for years Marc Harshman’s poetry for its sanity and its eye on our great teacher, history. In this captivating book, Harshman leads us inside a startling rapid-lens simultaneity of events: wars, environmental annihilations, deaths of elders, loves lost and restored, and, mysteriously, strangers’ missives and actions which inspire the poet to declare “I am suspicious of magic and compromise,/and satisfied to simply make room for wonders.” This is a great gift, of course, as it means these poems are the kind we return to and re-read. Specters are omnipresent—I think of John Clare, and Hardy, and James Wright. Accompanying the breathtaking invisibles, always, are real and present people and things, beheld in beauty.

—Judith Vollmer