Manyebook

Wood

Poetry. WOOD is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers — the real, the mythical, and the surrogate.

Pinocchio tries to make his father proud in a tempting world of sex and vice. A young caregiver to a special needs child ponders her romantic future alongside the true meaning of Crimson & Clover. Bess Houdini, married to the world's greatest magician, conjures the children she'll never have. Mad Men's Sally Draper, daughter of a philandering genius, grows up desperately trying to both defy her father and become him.

Harper accesses these imagined lives in order to get at ugly, funny, profound truths about parenthood: not being the child a parent hoped for; the horror of becoming like one's parents; the terrifying uncertainty about whether one should have children, yet also the loneliness of childlessness. The poems in WOOD are playful, surprising, tender, brave...and universal in their emotional resonance.

A selection from WOOD, "The Sally Draper Poems," has been featured in Slate.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 96
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781927380642
  • Genres
  • poetry, canada
  • Release date
  • 2013