Media Kit

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Reception

Colleen Harris sings of the vicissitudes of love—the heady highs and dull lows of love found and then, for good reason, walked away from—“I’ve misplaced my joy,” the poet says—all set against the steady thrum of daily life’s demands and pleasures. In these compelling and potent poems, the poet earns the right to declare, “I am weary/of all my drowning./I will keep my breath for myself.” – Andrew Hudgins, finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award.

We need poems that tell family stories just for the joy and sorrow of them, for the “shiver and proof of life.” In Colleen Harris’s narrative poetic sequence The Light Becomes Us, we follow an American family’s trajectory of first love, commitment, child-rearing, spousal abuse, justice, and acceptance. If these well-made poems were adapted to film, the camera would catch alternating degrees of sunlight and haunting darkness. A sometimes clear, sometimes gritty guitar soundtrack would paint the emotions of the young daughter, the mother, and the ultimate survivor. – Jeanie Thompson, author of The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller

Colleen Harris’s volume of poetry reveals her as a poet of the in-between, beginning with the title. It moves between two ways of reading it. Within the rich stream of themes, the power of the between shines through between love and violence, ifs and thens, spirit and flesh, caresses and collisions, past and future, mother and daughter, father and daughter, grief and grace. Colleen is a poet of wonder. – Dennis Slattery, author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 30 volumes, including seven volumes of poetry such as Casting the Shadows: Selected Poems and Just Below the Water Line: Selected Poems.