WILD GRACE

Harkin offers poems that include references to Persian mystics and draw from feminism and Buddhist teachings.

This quotable book features works that often directly address the reader. For example, the speaker in “How to Write Inspired Poetry” offers advice to other poets: “Pass agony the mic / and watch tenderness / uncurl from her / as she’s allowed to tell / her full story.” In some poems, the voice transitions from a second-person perspective to a collective first-person, perhaps to avoid alienating readers with preachiness, as in “Awakening is Messy”: “Awakening is bit by bit / coming out of denial / around all the reasons you’ve needed / to wield / that terrible tool of othering— / because so much is unbearable / inside of our own self.” The strongest moments occur when a metaphor or image emerges effortlessly, as in “Permission to Say Anything”: “Tell us of your affairs / with loneliness / and how you can’t seem to stop returning / to her cold bed.” The poet evokes Heraclitus and Buddhism in “We Drink the Same Water”: “We are made of ancient water / and our makeup is continually recycled / through the heavens.” Harkin seems to emulate Persian poet Hafez’s signature self-referential couplets, which are often mistaken for self-aggrandizement, in “Shadow Sherpa”: “With my pen I gut the heavens / and spill luminous entrails / all over the earth— / let the soul hungry hounds lap it up.” By contrast, in “Rumi’s Heart,” the speaker purports to know Hafez intimately and boldly transgresses his literary and cultural status: “Hafez, most likely, / was a gardener / of sorrow— / …. / I’m sorry if this disappoints you, / that even the greats / aren’t elitist untouchables / that have defied suffering.” This denouncement of elitism is in step with the accessibility of all the works in this collection, even to readers who may usually be averse to poetry, and simultaneously contradicts the branding of any poet as mystic.

Well-crafted and straightforward poetry.