This debut volume establishes Steve Willard as a true original, an artist whose kinetic sense of wordplay is deft, smart, and unfailingly provocative. Intended to be read in repeated passes, these poems are Cubist in feel, multifaceted in syntax, and brilliant in coloration. By turns disjunctive, narrative, plaintive, and disruptive, Harm. makes use of a wide formal range in reaching toward its ambition, which is nothing short of reclaiming lost human potentiality from current norms. Syntax flexes and the world is refigured, observed as if through a different camera's open aperture, drawing the reader to a new and transformative interior landscape.
Steve Willard’s work has been published in Colorado Review, Volt, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and 1913 – A Journal of Forms.
"You'll want to stop right now and read this book. No day should be without its adamancy, its invention, its honesty. Its edge of defiance, mixed with triumph, operates like a spotlight on human possibility. Always veering just out of sense on a curve of sound, Willard's is a voice that not only has something new to say but that has also has found a new way to say it. This is language at the speed of life."—Cole Swensen, author of The Book of a Hundred Hands
"Canny interrogations of the doubled thinking recognition is, exemplary instances of a deep attention to the way, say, "the waves as they come rolling in unbanded stay / scrolled off a heart," the poems in Steve Willard's first collection work the fine and lively edges where subject & object are involved in each other's uneasy invention. Harm. (and we should heard the charm & harmony here as well as the hurt, as well as a broken ghost of the title of Wallace Stevens' first book) sounds eerily into its equally desperate and delicate song a dense "reverberance" of all kinds of kindness "until a nature, neither of this world or a next net's, / attends us, does not exist." An urgently necessary and original book."—Laura Mullen, author of Subject
76 pp.6 x 8.25
9780520249837$24.95|£21.00Paper
Apr 2007