One of the hardest tasks I’ve experienced in the poetry world is writing blurbs for a few colleagues’ books. In the tradition of the poetry world, writing a good blurb involves reading the entire book, making notes on themes, motifs, and favorite passages, and then distilling that into a hopefully complimentary but not overstated paragraph of about 100 words that makes a potential reader want to explore the book.
Did I mention this is hard work and an act of significant generosity on the part of the blurbing poet?
“I came here / from everywhere I’d been” – Marie Harris
Today I’m recognizing poet Marie Harris, a former poet laureate of New Hampshire, for writing the lovely blurb that my publisher, Terrapin Books, chose to use as the description of Sugar Fix. Marie is also an essayist, children’s book author, voiceover artist, and a member of one of the country’s first women-centered poetry cooperatives, Alice James Books.
I’ve been lucky to spend some time with Marie and her husband, the photographer Charter Weeks, when they visited Tennessee poet laureate Maggi Vaughn in Bell Buckle. Not long after that, I got to better know Marie through her book Your Sun, Manny – a prose poem memoir of the couple’s adoption of a 14 year old Puerto Rican boy. Read my review of the book here on my blog.
Marie’s newest book, published in autumn 2019, is Desire Lines, published by Hobblebush Books. The collection takes the reader on a tour of both an external and internal landscape: from the “Safe Harbor” and “glittering frenzy” of New England sea and bird life, to the “Cathedral of Unrelieved Suffering” in the aftermath of a loved one’s accident, to these simple, beautiful lines in the title poem:
That March night when I came here / from everywhere I’d been / the snow was troweled thick as plaster / on the dark boughs and branches.
Learn more about the book and sample some of its poems here at Hobblebush Books.
The blurb and Walt Whitman
Some sources attribute the birth of the blurb to none other Walt Whitman. Read this interesting history of blurbs: Forget The Book, Have You Read This Irresistible Story On Blurbs? on NPR.
