Harm - Softcover

Gravendyk, Hillary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650560 ISBN 13: 9781890650568

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2012

Synopsis

Poetry. Offering a new narrative of physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact, HARM performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked-for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. Troubling the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, HARM shifts between warning and error, nature and the body. In the sense of Baudelaire's "correspondences," bloodclots externalize into "sunclots" and the air is "rusty with blood." The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Moving amid the prose poem and the lyric, HARM navigates a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders.

About this title

About the Author

Hillary Gravendyk is an Assistant Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Barnstorm, The Bellingham Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, The Eleventh Muse, FOURTEENS HILLS, MARY, 1913: A JOURNAL OF FORMS, Octopus Magazine, Tarpaulin Sky and other venues. She is the two-time winner of the Eisner Prize in Poetry and her chapbook, The Naturalist, was published by Achiote Press in 2008. Hillary is currently working on a critical book, Chronic Poetics, that explores intersubjectivity and embodiment in the poetic works of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, George Oppen, and Larry Eigner. She often collaborates with the photographer Benjamin Burrill and is interested in mixed-media forms. She lives in Claremont, California.

Review

"Harm, Hillary Gravendyk's powerful first book of poetry, is a book that resists summary indeed, one might aptly term it a book of resistances. . . A book of awarenesses and sensations; it articulates the micro-wisdoms of that peculiarly timeless condition that is everyday life, the site of lyric embodiment and our extraordinary mortality."   Lyn Hejinian, author, The Book of a Thousand Eyes

"Builds a botanica of hurts and healings, ruptures and resolutions. Its prose poems flesh out a world of intention and resemblance, and its exploded lyrics ring with 'bright sound.' The poems are beautiful and seek to rethink the beautiful, inviting us into a world that 'riots and unspools.'"  Elizabeth Willis, author, Address and Meteoric Flowers

"Most of Gravendyk's brief and evocative poems concern her recovery from major surgery: most of those achieve formal variety, emotional clarity (pain, fear, gratitude), and a jeweled fragmentation of phrasing." —Publishers Weekly (January 16, 2012)

About this edition

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1890650560
• ISBN 13: 9781890650568
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88