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"With a clear unsentimental lens on the past, Harp's smart and captivating poems dissect the remnants of time and what grief charges us with daily. Lyrically powerful and unique in their stark American landscape, these vibrating poems serve as ropes that pull us back into the river and out again towards a safer shore.
Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things: Poems
"In this poignant collection, the perilous imperative to mark one's life runs up against the expanding blanks of memory and of the language in which we resign ourselves to recover it. Beneath the hum and penance of the imaginable world and the loneliness of the unimaginable one, these poems weather."
Kimberly Johnson, author of Uncommon Prayer
"Harp transcribes and translates the world (and the otherworldly) into all its complexity. When he turns his keen attention to the ordinary, it transmutes before our eyes into the miraculous. Spirit Under Construction is beautifully strange and prescient, formally deft and subtle."
Eric Pankey, author of Crow-Work
About the author
Jerry Harp grew up in southern Indiana, where he studied English at St. Meinrad College (BA), a seminary run by Benedictine monks. He went on to receive degrees from St. Louis University (MA), the University of Florida (MFA), and the University of Iowa (PhD), where he specialized in Renaissance literature. He has taught at prep schools in St. Louis and at Kenyon College, and he currently teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Mary Szybist, and their cat, Anime.
