Description:
Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia, offers up his newest full-length collection of poems and demonstrates his dependably keen observational skills that elevate landscapes and people into an almost mythic realm. In many of the poems there is, as well, a threatening presence from whose grim circumstances he wrestles, if not hope, glimmers of its possibilities. And always there are signature poems like "Poet in the Schools" that simply lift off the page with a storyteller's finesse "for every single one of us / who's ever not been called on / who's felt hung out to dry, been picked last, / been poked, tripped, and toppled, / lost, strung out, yearning, abused, dying / somewhere out of sight / in our private universes, and he, he has opened the rooms / of paradise / for us to see / how simply easy it is / to smile. . ."
Brief description: Marc Harshman's Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House Press) won the Blue Lynx Prize. His fourteenth children's book, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Masterpiece (co-author, Anna Egan Smucker) was published by Roaring Brook / Macmillan. He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and his poem "Dispatch from the Mountain State" was printed in the 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the New York Times. His most recent publication was Dark Hills of Home published by Monongahela Books in 2022 to celebrate his tenth anniversary as Poet Laureate of West Virginia. He has recently been commissioned to write a poem to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of NPR's Mountain Stage.