Xmas Cheeseburgers

Jim Harrison

I was without Christmas spiritso I made three cow dogs,Lola and Blacky and Pinto,cheeseburgers with ground chuckand French St. André cheeseso that we’d all feel better.I delivered them to Hard Luck Ranchand said, “Chew each bite 32 times.”They ignored me and gobbled.The world that used to nurse usnow keeps shouting inane instructions.That’s why I ran to the woods.

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photo of Jim Harrison
Photo:
Andy Anderson

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva, and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man’s Float (2016). His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art form, he wrote: “Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.” Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.

cover of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems

Port Townsend, Washington

"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction—or reintroduction—to the work of this singular writer…
these pieces illustrate Harrison’s range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative
suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural
world, where ‘the cost of flight is landing.’"
The Washington Post

"[Harrison] may no longer be with us, but this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."
Literary Hub

"An untrammeled renegade genius… Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing
absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."
Publishers Weekly

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