The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies presents a renewed look at elegy as a long-standing tradition in the literature of loss, exploring recent shifts in the continuum of these memorial poems. This volume investigates the tensions arising in elegiac formulations of grief through detailed analyses of seminal poets, including Wordsworth, Keats, and Plath, using […]
Read moreJudith Harris is the author of three books of poems, Atonement, The Bad Secret and Night Garden, and the critical book, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, The Southern Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, and American Life in Poetry. She has taught at Frost Place and at universities in […]
Read moreThe Bad Secret takes readers on a dark yet sometimes comic sojourn through the undercurrents of a life suddenly unmoored by grief, and then to the subsequent rise of the spirit to recovery. Tough-minded and intellectual, Judith Harris’s poems are also distinguished by brilliant images close to metaphysical. They reflect on childhood, nature, mental and […]
Read moreA deeply personal yet universal work, Signifying Pain applies the principles of therapeutic writing to such painful life experiences as mental illness, suicide, racism, domestic abuse, and even genocide. Probing deep into the bedrock of literary imagination, Judith Harris traces the odyssey of a diverse group of writers—John Keats, Derek Walcott, Jane Kenyon, Michael S. […]
Read moreAtonement is Judith Harris’ poetic family album, a scrapbook filled with remembrances of a suburban Jewish upbringing and reflections on motherhood and family life. In its pages are pieces about family members; violin, drawing and horseback riding lessons; fishing; a child’s tea party; a babysitter who does a striptease. And there are darker verses about her […]
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