By Jerry Harp

Gatherings is the co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize.

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• Reviewed in New Orleans Review, Vol. 32, No. 1

I have long been a fan of Jerry Harp's poetry, but in Gatherings he outdoes himself.  These new poems are formally brilliant, playfully colloquial, and often very moving. I rarely come across a poet with such startling gifts, a poet who fuses great musical ability and intelligence with such facility. Away from the fads and short-lived literary movements, Jerry Harp is at once technically masterful and deeply thoughtful. He is one of the very best young poets at work today.

- Kevin Prufer

How wonderful, after so many theme-driven books of poetry, to read a real collection, a book in which every poem casts its own shadow. Jerry Harp is a poet of astonishing range, and the obsessions of Gatherings emerge quietly in poems through wistful, unsettling images, in lines that are tautly metrical or spun far across the page, as if to see what they might gather.

- Janet McAdams

About the Author

Jerry Harp, co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize, grew up in Mt. Vernon, Indiana.  He has degrees from Saint Meinrad College, Saint Louis University, the University of Florida, and the University of Iowa. His other books of poems are Creature (Salt Publishing, 2003), and Urban Flowers,Concrete Plains (Salt Publishing, 2006).  He teaches at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.