Songs of Unreason Hardcover - 2011

From the publisher

Poetry Foundation Bestseller List
"Los Angeles Times" Book Prize finalist Michigan Notable Book
High Plains Book Award finalist Balcones Prize finalist
A beautifully mysterious inquiry... Here Harrisonforthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerninga gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico Garcia Lorca to how he touched a bear s head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual musings, Harrison celebrates movement as the pulse of life, and art, which scrubs the soul fresh. "Booklist"

Harrison has written a nearly pitch-perfect book of poems, shining with the elemental force of Neruda's "Odes" or Matisse's paper cutouts....In "Songs of Unreason, ," his finest book of verse, Harrison has stripped his voice to the bare essentials--to what must be said, and only what must be said." "The Wichita Eagle"

"Songs of Unreason, " Harrison s latest collection of poetry, is a wonderful defense of the possibilities of living. His are hard won lines, but never bitter, just broken in and thankful for the chance to have seen it all. "The Industrial Worker Book Review"

Unlike many contemporary poets, Harrison is philosophical, but his philosophy is nature-based and idiosyncratic: Much that you see/ isn t with your eyes./ Throughout the body are eyes. As in all good poetry, Harrison s lines linger to be ruminated upon a third or fourth time, with each new reading revealing more substance and raising more questions. "Library Journal"

It wouldn t be a Harrison collection without the poet, novelist, and food critic s reverence for rivers, dogs, and womenhis poems stun us simply, with the richness of the clarity, detail, and the immediacy of Harrison s voice. "Publishers Weekly"

Jim Harrison's compelling and provocative "Songs of Unreason" explores what it means to inhabit the world in atavistic, primitive, and totemistic ways. "This can be disturbing to the learned," Harrison admits. Using interconnected suites, brief lyrics, and rollicking narratives, Harrison's passions and concernscreeks, thickets, time's effervescence, familial loveemerge by turns painful and celebratory, localized and exiled.

About the author