The clouds move inlike quiet neighbors.The windwalks down the hill.The cover crophas gotten really talland I love you.And the seas are risingand the meteorsare showering abstractly.And there are too many gunsand I love you.I wish I knew what callsthe Devil from the pits—I have a few theoriesscattered though they arelike wildflowersin the marbleyard.And I have held a mareby her matted maneand clucked my tongueto summon spring.And the azaleasmirror the godlightand the dogwoodsreally do glow in the darklike the meteorsaforementioned.I love youand the horses idlelike old carsin the shaggy field.Everyone is poorbut somehow has horses.I can’t explain itbut I wish I couldor how it is a horse isever a breakable thing.
Here and There
Chelsea Harlan
Feature Date
- June 23, 2023
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“Here and There” from Bright Shade: by Chelsea Harlan.
Published by The American Poetry Review October 4th 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Chelsea Harlan.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Chelsea Harlan was born and raised in Appalachian Virginia. She holds a BA in Literature and Visual Art from Bennington College, as well as an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Rose Goldstein Scholar. She is the author of a chapbook, Mummy, written in collaboration with London-based painter Daisy Parris, which was released by Montez Press in 2019, and her chapbook Country Music was released from Two Plum Press in 2021. She lives in upstate New York, where she works at a small public library.
"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
"'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 thoughts—a kind of consciousness without shades—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
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