Chelsea Harlan’s Bright Shade is always playful in a way that asks the reader to join in with the play, to fully participate in a poetry that enjoys language enough to arrive at the most serious of realizations. This beautiful debut seems to ask not just what poetry is but what it can be. And each poem answers, “Every raindrop / a little bell, // every switchback / and holler baptized.”
— Jericho Brown, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Tradition
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“We all have our preferred side of the outhouse” one of Chelsea Harlan’s poems says. Her poems make me want to write. Which is another way of saying these poems make me feel writing is possible. The diction crackles. The range of velocities (speed is not necessarily fast) is shapely. And the rates of speed of thought — a kind of consciousness without shade — are attuned to nature in ways that make sure the emphasis falls on reality, and keeps moving. The book spins with strength and fragility on that curious internal / external axis we juggle constantly as humans.
— Anselm Berrigan, author of Something for Everybody
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Selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, Bright Shade is an appreciation of the wild woods, the rolling hills, the Appalachian air, and the little rivers that were the setting of Chelsea Harlan’s upbringing. The poems speak through the liminal space between the body and its relationships to other bodies, and the human relationship with nature—and so climate change is, inevitably, part of this book's undercurrent of grief. As the author navigates the high highs and the low lows of delight and despair, Bright Shade articulates the wonder that accompanies sadness and the sadness that accompanies joy. Chelsea Harlan’s work is as melancholic as it is humorous, indeed bittersweet, and a little bit strange (APR, 2022).
PURCHASE :
Purchase Bright Shade from anywhere, but ideally from the wonderful folks behind American Poetry Review, or from your local independent bookshop, and / or inquire at your public library about procuring a copy of Bright Shade for your community’s shelves.
To request a copy for review or for pedagogical purposes, please send a little note.
LISTEN :
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The cover art for Bright Shade is by Nate Luce: “Giovanna,” glass beads and wax on masonite, artist’s concrete frame, 2018 (photo by Henry Austin). Book design and composition by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.
