The poems in this book exhibit Megan Harlan’s great
attention to and skill with form, sound, and language. The poems are
constantly surprising, taking us to the far corners of the poet's
metaphorical maps, and, in her words, “gesturing us to go further.” This is
imaginative writing at its very best—visual, aural, metaphorical, ethical,
and adventurous. The poet constructs genuinely new topographies for us that
offer significant and original inroads into our understanding of what it
means to be human.
—Sidney Wade
Final Judge, John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
When I think of mapmaking in contemporary
American poetry I usually see a poet
setting up surveying equipment in uncharted
lands somewhere between Elizabeth
Bishop’s Geography and Charles
Olson’s Maximus. Megan Harlan’s work has the
control of Bishop, the range and risk of
Olson, and aches with a strange fernweh – a
German word she translates roughly as “farsickness,”
the opposite of homesickness
– and “the wayward sweep of desire.” These
maps are psychological and spiritual as
well as geographical, and they tend, in the
words of the title poem, to find their way
by “routes chosen for what they bypass” and
reveal “where we each go missing . . .
gesturing us to go further.”
—John Matthias
Notre Dame Review
Megan Harlan’s nuanced, visionary poems
explore farsickness, the sensation of
missing places we’ve never been, including
the imaginary realms of lotusland and
limbo--recast as a motel featuring “machines
with unlimited ice.” They navigate the
recombinant powers of memory and consider
the mind’s ability to render time and
space transparent--”the sheer elsewhere”--
via cognition and dreams. “It’s the world
that moves in mysterious ways, I’ve found,”
Harlan writes. And in her elegantly
unsettling poems nothing is stable: firm
ground is displaced by a shifting panoply
of reflection, a multiverse “casting
prismatic sizzle.” A profound meditation on the
permeability of past and present, nature and
artifice, self and other, space and time, Mapmaking is a miracle of
invention.
—Alice Fulton
Harlan’s poems are nimble and imaginatively fleet, but never
far from a beating heart, a breathing and dreaming body. No small part of
the pleasures to be found in
