Reck

Leslie Harrison’s Reck emerges from the ecstatic tradition, in which language transcends concrete meaning and becomes visionary. These poems are driven by the engine of litany, the structure of the parable, and the music of the praise song. They are epistolary and elegiac; they entice, leap, charm, and ritualize with the combustible energies of creation and apocalypse. Reck originates from the wisdom of many disciplines—physics, ecology, history, theology, astronomy—all framed by the lyric imperative. Many poets observe and enact beauty. Harrison channels beauty’s DNA, its elemental design, and its wreckage, and through the sheer force of imagination, its unlikely resurrection. Reck wrecked and reckoned me.
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets 

“Come be with me we have tickets for the end/ of the world,” Leslie Harrison writes in her extraordinary and propulsive new collection, Reck. The book begins with a definition of the title: to pay attention and to be alarmed, setting the stage for the labor of these poems to recognize, catalogue, and grieve the burning world “here in the last America.” Harrison achieves a kind of apocalyptic sublime in her obsessive, gorgeous work, inviting the reader to mourn within her music, and recognize within her imagery, what we’ve lost. “& I want you to follow me/ & into the forest of no more answers no more questions,” Harrison writes. Yes, I will follow, and reader, I hope you will too.
—Allison White 

Leslie Harrison has masterfully written a world where only the glittering clauses remain, where the words that came before have disappeared.  Each line trembles like the torn half of something lost, like “tickets for the end / of the world.”  Reading RECK is to gain admittance into a heartbreaking and gorgeous final act of a world so filled with hope it might, through some miracle, “turn sunlight into children” and begin again. 
— Sabrina Orah Mark 

The Book of Endings

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

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

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

Displacement

A heart wrenching, fabulous book about love and betrayal. Through mythic disguise and formal control, it enacts a devastatingly exact account of marital breakdown, erotic vagrancy, regret and anger…A tough and beautiful collection.”
—Alan Shapiro, author of Old War