Pearl
Michael Andre Harman
ISBN 978-1-956005-70-7 106 pages $16.00
Michael’s work beautifully negotiates a complex territory between lyric utterance and a more experimental, intertextual or ‘open’ mode of composition. I am struck by the fineness of his ear and of his syntactic timing, and by the interplay of intelligence and feeling.
Malcolm Woodland
While Michael’s style is produced to a certain extent by method, its beauty can only come from his talent selecting, arranging, and perhaps intervening in the results of that method, as an essential contributing factor in the process and product. He is a serious, informed, talented poet.
Albert Frank Moritz
Michael Harman has sewn together the voices of other writers, Daedalus-like. And like Daedalus’ creations, his poems walk about mechanically and mechanically sing in their own Frankenstein voices ... and what voices! Who knew the monster could be so mellifluous, so honeyed!
David Tinmouth
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 two full-length books: Fire (2018), and Pearl (2020). Michael’s poetry examines what language bears, conceals, and hatches, and persists in its questions about the nature of beauty, form, spirit, and transformation.
