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Winner of the Blue Lynx Prize 2017
by Marc Harshman
We all know that language in the wrong hands can
become the enemy of truth, and that history and memory, with their inherent
losses, haunt as often as they succor. Thank goodness, then, for Marc Harshman.
His lyrical insight and empathic imagination remind us again and again of the
solacing power of poetry. Much of what hurts and heals in Woman in Red Anorak lies just
beneath the surface of the quotidian, where Harshman finds something resembling
hope. And yet his is a hard-earned optimism inflected by the honesty of a true
maker, a poet whose fidelity to humanity is matched only by his extraordinary
vision.
—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 VollmerAbout the Author:
Born in Indiana, MARC HARSHMAN received a bachelor’s degree from
Bethany College and advanced degrees from the Yale Divinity School and the
University of Pittsburgh. His poetry collection, Believe
What You Can, was published in 2016 by West Virginia University
Press and won the Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association.
Periodical publications include The
Georgia Review, The Progressive, The Chariton Review, Salamander, Shenandoah, and Appalachian Heritage. His fourteenth children’s
book, Fallingwater, co-written with Anna
Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is currently poet
laureate of West Virginia.
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