Leslie Harrison holds graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Displacement, won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books. She lives and teaches in Baltimore.
In the alchemy of these darkly fluid poems, grief and solace meet.
There is also the clash between isolation and the profound solitude
encountered in the natural world. The result is an ongoing prayer
for consolation, even if such prayer flies into the heavens without
answer. Yet these predicaments leave us this absorbing book, an
island in the sea of the human spirit, and a claim for the
transcendent value of art.--Maurice Manning
It's often snowing in these inconsolable poems of beautiful refusal
. . . refusal to accept death, refusal to be silent in the face of
ever-accumulating loss. Almost always, the poems unfurl using a
line that feels continuous, like a sustained exhalation, making
each poem an emotional river. While the poems have delicacy of
image, they are relentless in their momentum. The gradual erosion
and dispersal of our physical selves, our decomposition into the
elements, these perpetual disappearances mortality insists on, are
sung of here, along with the fact that spiritually and
scientifically, all this leave-taking is also a form of fecundity.
These are incantatory and hypnotic poems. --Amy Gerstler
The poems in Leslie Harrison's The Book of Endings test for
themselves Wallace Stevens' assertion, "There is no wing like
meaning." Each poem takes up the challenge "to attempt meaning" in
a world marked by loss, "to unfold the dead hawk's wing and ask it
about flight." The reader first feels the musical delicacy of these
lines--and then their ferocity. Part prayer, part protest, these
poems both wish for and--necessarily--resist the desire to mend the
world.--Jennifer Clarvoe
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