Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 84
- Language: English
- Date Published: November, 2019
- ISBN: 978-1-948017-57-2
Praise
Shadowrise, the first collection by the hugely talented Mary Harpin, surprises, delights, compels our attention. I love the confidence the poet shows in this book, the bold choices in arrangement, content, form, and tone. You will notice what I noticed: each page you turn leads to another poem with a title that makes you lean towards that page, to see what this poet has conjured from the cosmos, from landscapes, from daily life, from love and fear and, most importantly, from paying attention to what fate and choice have taken away, and given. This book shines with intelligence and a particular kind of wisdom. Read it, read it again, wait with patience, or impatience, for her next book. —Deborah Keenan
In Shadowrise, Mary Harpin poses cosmic questions in intimate terms, starting with the Matador and the Incarnation(s): literally, the killer and the flesh. The questions are huge, not distant, but rather as intimate as that warm drizzle of garlic butter down your beloved’s chin. Not all is domestic bliss, however: we meet the sister returning to her husband whose gravity pulls her in like a black hole. The good with the bad, yes, but always, we encounter the sensuous in this glissando of spacetime where she invites us into the small universe of the woodpecker nest as her joyous focus shifts from the orange and purple mountain. Her intellectual delight informs these poems from galaxy to nest. And her answer to the cosmic question is always yes. —Robin Scofield
Excerpt
It Comes to Rest
My husband’s book is half-read.
He lies back on the couch.
My leg is draped over his lap.
One child is asleep in her bed,
her hand on an open book.
Another child is asleep on my lap,
hair still wet from the bath.
Crushed cherries have sunk to the
bottom of my glass, and of his.
The dryer chimes. The click of
zippers and buttons stops.
The last load of the day stops spinning.
Author
MARY HARPIN is a poet, a medium and a content strategist for global Fortune 500 companies. You can find her work in Terrain, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox and others. This is her first full-length collection of poems. Mary lives in Denver with her family.
Learn more at maryharpin.com