Michael Harman’s new book of poetry, Plumbing Techniques, is a marvel of Emersonian Whim embraced by some serious attitude and thinking beyond the usual kind about where and who we are. The opening poems follow his training and introduction to the vicissitudes of the Plumbing Trade, a kind of detailed education in the manner of Henry Adams. He gives us the truth, but following Ms. Dickenson’s advice, tells it slant. Success in Circuit lies, she goes on, and the circuit of Harman’s slant vision takes us through word-blazed energy passages that deliver us to surprise after surprise in the midst of the ordinary. Harman’s language/mind dances in and out of daily chores and jobs—refracted through a lens of wonder—and into a world of thoughtful entanglement with death, writing, love, all those miraculous dimensions that open our ordinary time into eternity, and does it with humour and a sharp intelligence. Who could ask more from their plumber?
      Michael Boughn

Michael Harman started studying and writing poetry in 2014 with the bpNichol lane writers group in Toronto, and quickly became fascinated with 20th Century American poetry as well as the use of Oulipian procedures in composition. Under the mentorship of Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman, his love of poetry has culminated in three full-length books: Fire (2018), Pearl (2020) and Plumbing Techniques (2024). Michael’s poetry examines what language bears, conceals, and hatches, and persists in its questions about the nature of beauty, form, spirit, and transformation.