Comet Scar

In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.

James Harms

James Harms is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including After West, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2008. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and the PEN/Revson Fellowship. He lives with his wife, Amanda Cobb, and their children in Morgantown, West Virginia, where he teaches at West Virginia University. He also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

Reviews

James Harms' poems have always posited the dailiness of any revelation. . . . He wants to remind us that many of the grandest things available to us can be had for even the smallest gesture.

—David St. John

Over the course of five books of poetry, James Harms has created a poetic that weds the personal and public and moves deftly from narrative to lyric, often blurring the lines between these modes.

—Shara McCallum, The Antioch Review

He is a poet of the dramatic vignette, wonderfully able to conjure a scene, its characters, and its emotional and psychological aura so vividly that each poem become immediately indelible; on rereading, its situation comes rushing back virtually full-force.

—Booklist

James Harms is one of the truly visionary and restless voices of our time.

—Laura Kasischke

Harms' poems display an amazing fidelity to the personal here and now, and at the same time to the national history and landscape. . . . I think of Larry Levis saying, "To follow my imagination is my only real duty." This Harms does beautifully in ways that touch off possibilities in our heads as we read.

—The Charleston Gazette

In poem after poem, [Harms] shows the way we bridge the gaps between private mind and public world and move from alienation to connection. The poems' speakers reach, over and over again, to push us and themselves beyond disillusionment.

—Willow Springs

Ordering Information

To purchase Comet Scar by James Harms, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.