Judith Harris

Night Garden: Poems

Judith 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 the Washington, DC area.

Judith Harris creates tableaux of memory and shines a keen light on the particulars of the natural world in these poignant, carefully observed, and scrupulously written poems that ache with mortality. Night Garden is an illuminating book! 

— Edward Hirsch. (MacArthur Fellow) 

With her unwavering attention to mortality and the temporality of all things, even “the stars that are so heavy / they burn themselves alive,” Judith Harris always senses “just the right object  / to illuminate, and recast into gold.” Poem after poem, she moves far beyond the art of having written a lyric; she has lived it, and in living it, has taken it—and us to a transcendent place. Night Garden is Harris’ finest collection.” 

–Claudia Emerson (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)