francine j. harris
“I guess I realized in the last several years that I'm not the kind of person who's interested in preserving language. I love how it changes. I'm not afraid of textspeak, I'm not afraid of abbreviations. I think we just wind up doing more fun things with how language appears. Twerking! We're twerking our language.”
2021 NBCC Award for Poetry
LAMBDA Literary Award
“Entering mid-career with her extraordinary third book, harris . . . fully emerges as one of the best and most relevant contemporary poets. She writes with a historical and linguistic reach . . . She is also in league with some of the great practitioners of poetry that makes no distinction between the personal and the political, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Adrienne Rich.”
“I mean, beautiful is part of it—woundingly, shreddingly, frighteningly beautiful. But it’s more than that. I feel like these are poems that crowbar open the sealed-up worlds of our hurt and let some light in. And that’s only part of it too. What francine j. harris does with language—diction, syntax, the line, the image—is unlike almost anything I know. I’m saying, they re-imagine and re-deploy language in an almost unspeakable way. I read these poems with my eyes and brain, I’m saying, but I read them with my heart and my gut, too. With my neck and the stuff between my vertebrae. My fingernails. I think you have to. I read these poems not knowing they were possible, I’m saying. Thinking stuff like my god. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“In her debut collection, allegiance, francine j. harris makes an instrument of each poem. Somehow both surgical and blunt, the poems sing. That is, they will wake your neighbors. These poems highlight the limits of propriety, but what might appear to be irreverence is devotion cleansed of pretense. The object of Harris’s devotion is often Detroit, and like the city she loves, the poems have little patience for sentimentality. They’ll snatch you up by the collar, throw you in a chair and make you listen. And then, line by line, these poems will break your heart.”
francine j harris’ most recent book of poetry is Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet's voice.” Her second book, play dead (Alice James, 2017) won a LAMBDA Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, and was nominated for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Her debut collection, Allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012) was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,the MacDowell Colony, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Cave Canem.
When asked in an interview to categorize her poetry, harris responded, “I think that if you’re writing now, it’s going to be impossible to categorize yourself. We think, historically, in hindsight. What people are writing now will be considered and compared and contrasted in the long run. And I know that some people do this, but I think it’s a bad move to busy yourself trying to categorize your own thing. First of all, you see things an entirely different way than other people see them. I don’t know if I’m going to be chalked up as a post-confessionalist, for example. Maybe. I know that the confessional mode has influenced me, and I struggle with it. I know that I’ve been influenced by deep imagery, too. So, I’m good with imagery, but I’m always trying to do other things, too. I don’t want to boil it down to, “I write confessional poems, or I write image poems.” I always want to play with things. I’m always trying to figure out what’s next.”
harris received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and was writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s taught creative writing at University of Michigan and Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Originally from Detroit, she is currently She is currently Professor of English at University of Houston.
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