Isolating One’s Priorities in a Time of Crisis by Jan Harris

Harris’ poetic landscape is apocalypse, imagined and real. Full of hydroponic lettuce, empty cul-de-sacs, unrequited raptures, our own resilient bodies, and the intimacy of isolation – this is a dystopian collection to relish.

–Amalie Flynn, author of Wife and War: The Memoir

just a stranger in a strange strange place

–Kevin Morby

Jan Harris‘s Isolating One’s Priorities in a Time of Crisis reads like a mystic whispering danger where “the sounds of our own voices unimaginable” howl from a phantom of recycled mornings. Harris uses the ouroboros to circle around you as she guides you toward meaning in this chaotic time—Harris knows you are afraid, she doesn’t take that away from you, she just joins you in empathy, almost as if “[o]ur lives ran parallel until we met in the knot.” Isolating One’s Priorities in a Time of Crisis contains palpable, surreal moments where the reader must confront the typhonic mind of the virtual human hollow-gram we have been hiding behind. She guides the reader through this human terror of monotony in time, yet still she guides your eyes to the living stars, “declaring that the stars / are not dead but are hidden / from one another like us.” Harris’s work is one you read again and again because her love for lavishing language cannot be denied. I will never stop learning from Jan Harris—you are safe with Harris as she shows you the darkness, but softly reminds you that the “wildflowers crowd [the] meadows and in the shadows / green things begin to grow.”

Harris’s writing is gritty, surreal, and intrepid.

–Robyn Leigh Lear, Poetry Editor for WAXING & WANING: A LITERARY JOURNAL and Creative Director for April Gloaming Publishing—and forever a student  of Dr. Jan from long ago