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.

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, Fourteen 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.

— Poetry Daily