Harm Eden

Jennifer Nelson

POETRY  |  $18 $16.20

October 2021
Read an excerpt

from “The History of Medicine”

Now imagine Vesalius

touching your baby.

He talks a lot about it.

Especially the skull 

from which he draws conclusions

about softness

reminds him of rain on Vesuvius,

he writes in his diary

which will not survive.

Rain on Vesuvius before

or after an eruption?

asks a later entry.

While in quarantine Vesalius

writes letters to his past.

The past as best as he and we

can reconstruct it answers

During. Think of smoke

bushes on lava

and ashballs freighted with wet.

Ongoing death by suffocation

steamed by unrocked rock.

No one wants Vesalius

to touch their infant’s head

but he does, over millennia

and miles that aren’t his. Creeper caress

like a Care reacc in sacred time

while in Wisconsin

over fields of unborn corn

five hawks arrive for slaughter.

intertextual, entwined, weaving edges with language and events both current and bedrock

Hoa Nguyen

Harm Eden is about how our fucked-up present-day civilization is built on originary and timeless systemic damage. The fantasy of nature and/or art as echoes of a purer creation reinforces this foundation all the more. This book attempts to think through and simultaneously away from this evil fantasy and the civilization it upholds by exploiting the tension between history and poetry.

About the Author

Jennifer Nelson is the author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (UDP); Civilization Makes Me Lonely, winner of the Sawtooth Prize (Ahsahta); and Harm Eden (UDP). Her work has appeared in Panda’s Friend, A Perfect Vacuum, Social Text, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; she was the Offen Poet at the University of Chicago in 2020. She is also assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State University Press).

Praise

Beginning with an invocation to Clio, the muse of history, Jennifer Nelson's Harm Eden reaches for the muse's hand, stands amid the rubble of our collective mythologies and origin stories, and surveys the damage with a wry, irreverent intelligence. In Nelson's poems art collapses time, but time is unruly; it invariably reconstitutes, resists human interventions, upturns the illusion of linearity and progress. "I know what time looks like," Nelson writes with unsettling defiance, "I have to believe the right world follows,” even as what follows comes trailing the ghosts of the broken world that came before.

Genya Turovskaya

We often seem to be quite the trio: people, nature, and culture—like three drunk friends with our arms around each other's shoulders singing our way down the street, turning on each other when the road we're on turns out to lead, well, nowhere. The poems in Jennifer Nelson's captivating Harm Eden will make you reconsider what you thought was comfortable or comforting about the act of looking, whether it's at our earthly flora and fauna, our own soft beastliness, or the permanence of pasts we've trapped in artistic depiction. How casually an observer might put everything in order, waving a wand and ultimately naming it all "history"; "I have given my life to history / and I do not care about history." Resonant and subversive, Harm Eden is an invaluable companion during "this place and time and pose // of which // some are more the fulcrum / of the hourglass than others."

Jacqueline Waters

I love this book: intertextual, entwined, weaving edges with language and events both current and bedrock. The poems of Harm Eden offer important comment, inquiry, and correspondence as they dialog with art, history, and perception. 'Everyone comes to examine the dreadhole at least once.'

Hoa Nguyen, poet and author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure


Praise for Previous Work

[Civilization Makes Me Lonely] is wicked. Who knew poetry could frack the totality?

Anne Boyer

On the ways that the conservation of art also functions as the conservation of its imperialistic memes, she writes conspicuously anti-rationally, and is all the more convincing for it. Her poetics is dizzyingly paced, eminently associative, and formally disordered (the Pollaiolo section, for example, contains five permutations of the same sonnet, itself an ekphrasis of a painting, which ends up reading more like an Oulipian exercise than an Elizabethan cycle). It mimics both the lushness of Renaissance art and the expediency of electronic correspondence.

Maggie Milner

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-77-0
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 104 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: October 01 2021
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)