EDWARD HARKNESS
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"Reading these poems,” writes novelist David Long in his introduction to Ed Harkness’ Creek Water: New & Selected Poems, “you’re reminded how crucial it is to be specific, to understand that, truly, something happens only once—look away and you miss it. You never find Harkness hiding in generalities—he’s on Timberwolf Mountain, Meek’s Table, or Quang Tin Province; those aren’t birds, they’re pine siskins or water ouzels. He makes us hear the names—lupine, shooting star, monkshood; he makes us see what he sees. What a gift." ~David Long, author of
The Inhabited World.
In The Law of the Unforeseen, Edward Harkness confronts the bleak truths of our time in which we search for the right words to keep all who might be labeled as “other” alive and thriving in the true family of things, a union that blends the actual and imagined and includes the living world as urgently as the world of ugly vase, thrift-store spoon, broken, half-buried beach shell, and the “floral design of pond ice.” The embrace of this important collection is truly Whitmanesque. I deeply admire how it keeps breaking me even as it pulls me toward its heart where every bloodied instant lives alongside some unlikely bit of mending.
~Derek Sheffield, Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Through the Second Skin
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RELEASED
SEPTEMBER13, 2025
