The Power of Perusal

3min read

| By Catherine DiMercurio |

在审查报名Contemporary Authors卷。403, I stumbled across the name of a poet,弗朗辛学家哈里斯。注:她使她的名字这种方式;它不是一个错字。诗人拒绝的大写字母是不是有什么钩住了我的注意,虽然。从她的生平的话我跳走了:Detroit. Cave Canem fellow. Alice James Books。他们坚持用我,因为这些词也与另一poet-相关Jamaal May—whose work I am more familiar with.

I was lucky enough to attend lectures and readings May gave during my grad school residencies in Vermont, and luckier still to hear him read his work in Detroit, particularly those poems from the 2014 collectionHum。(Please find a copy ofHum立即读取“Macrophobia(等待的恐惧。”)我说幸运还是因为发现可能离家很近,外面温暖的,读研究生的创意鸟巢是一个礼物,一个重新连接我我的写作的自我。我们都需要这样的礼物,有时,这提醒我们已经在我们的舌前端和等待的话小事为浊音。

May and harris are both Detroit poets, both have been published by Alice James Books, and both have been Cave Canem fellows. (TheCave Canem Foundation是自称为一个非盈利文艺服务机构“家黑诗”,而艾丽斯·詹姆斯书籍is a small publisher that focuses on “a broad range of voices from the poetry community.”) Knowing May’s work, and seeing similar credentials associated with harris, I knew I could expect exquisite writing if I continued following the path leading me to her work. When I started reading harris’s poems, I wasn’t disappointed. I also found some reviews of her poetry, and I noticed that one of the words most commonly associated with harris’s poetry was “raw.” This was true, I found. The writing lays open, right to the bone, the emotions spawned by love, sexuality, and various types of transformations.

I’m speaking specifically about harris’s 2016 collection,Play Dead, published by Alice James Books. In a way, though, “raw” suggests messy, and in my opinion harris’s writing is both too reflective and too controlled for such a descriptor to be entirely accurate. I suppose that is one of the beautiful things about poetry: you get to decide for yourself how it makes you feel. Maybe you will find harris’s poems to be raw and marked by a sense of urgency. Yet when I read poems such as harris’s “enough food and a mom,” I find them haunting, and full of memory, ache, and loss.

As painful as some of harris’s work is, it is also undeniably moving, thought-provoking, and smart, and I was happy to discover it in this stumbling, accidental way of paths crossing. Jamaal May, Detroit, poetry,Contemporary Authors和弗朗辛学家哈里斯,所有的纠结一个上午在这里Farmington Hills的。由于许多最好的发现在这样的情形出现,在-他们的方式制成,我建议perusingin any way, shape, or form in which you can do it: flip through a volume ofContemporary Authors, wander through the stacks in your library, or follow one path to the next as you explore Gale’s文献资源中心。Sometimes you discover exactly what you forgot you needed, and it may simply be the hint of inspiration seeing you through from one breath to the next.

Would you like to know more? Contact your Gale Representative today.


关于作者


凯瑟琳是大风(和项目编辑发育编辑金宝搏彩票Contemporary Authors),一个热心的素食亚军,而最近MFA研究生。如果空闲时间要过,她可能会发现写作,阅读,或享受一些停机时间与她的两个少年。



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