104 pp, ISBN 978-1-904130-29-1, £10.99 / $22.00 (Hardback), US Publication April 2008 / UK publication July 2008

104 pp, Paperback ISBN 978-1-904130-27-7, £7.99 / $15.95 (Paperback), US Publication, April 2008 / UK publication June 2008

Post-free for on-line credit/debit card orders

I wish to order this book

 

A note about Identity Theft The poems in Joseph Harrison’s second collection, Identity Theft, map the erosions and betrayals of selfhood, both cyberspace-age and age-old. If the high-speed title poem and the other menacing “Trajectories” of the book’s first section register the disintegration of identity under contemporary pressures, social and technological, the focus of the book’s second sequence, “Odes and Elegies,” is more personal and retrospective, dealing with the curtailment of identity by loss and encroaching mortality. The third section’s “Tropes” suggest that language and art, which might seem to hold the promise of preserving something of the self, transform those who use them beyond recognition, while some of the final section’s “Odes” put our current identity crisis in a longer historical perspective. Identity Theft pursues these concerns through poems in a variety of forms, displaying a range of scale, tone, and subject, poems that are funny yet serious, informed by the past but fully present, both idiosyncratic and resonant.

A note on Joseph Harrison Joseph Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else’s Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post and was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998 (ed. John Hollander), 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (ed. Billy Collins), The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poems (ed. Harold Bloom), and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Baltimore.

Praise for Identity Theft “Joseph Harrison’s new volume is a wonderful leap in his poetic development. Harrison fuses formal control with a rich interiority and composes many poems that deserve to become canonical.” – Harold Bloom “How deeply satisfying it is to read a poet whose meditative, elegiac temperament is married happily to verbal wit, even laugh-out-loud humor. Joseph Harrison is that rare poet, one whose command of craft suits him equally to produce a two-line ‘Ode’ (‘O elevated visionary thoughts, / Where are you now?’) and a ten-page public poem (‘To George Washington in Baltimore’) on that American giant who understood the ‘human scale.’ A poet so giddy with wordplay that he dares to rhyme ‘my palm is piloted’ with ‘Pontius Pilated’ and ‘pirated,’ Harrison addresses nonetheless the most serious concerns. Wary of our technology-dominated present and future, in which ‘identity theft’ is no joke (and ‘what fave new world is beckoning?’), Harrison makes his fingerprint evident in all of these poems – an implicit affirmation of something unique in each of us.” – Mary Jo Salter “The title poem of Joseph Harrison’s second book is a witty and headlong discussion of how one’s self, if any, is constituted. We are a patchwork, it develops, and the same might be said of Harrison’s book, which makes continual and expert use of Spenser, Wordsworth, Horace, Villon, and other predecessors. If this makes Identity Theft seem a three-ring circus, the important point is that Harrison is a superlative ringmaster: his book throughout is governed by that playfulness and performance which, as Frost said, are required in poetry however impassioned or serious. I found myself particularly moved by ‘Who They Were,’ which recalls the poet’s mother and father in the stanza of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’.” – Richard Wilbur

From Identity Theft   To an Aldabran Tortoise, Dead at 250             The races of the swift,             Who swiftly come and go Like fads or pop stars, trending out of sight Almost before we see them, given their gift             For getting something right             For fifteen minutes or so, The one-hit wonders, overnight sensations,             Pet Rocks and Salad Shooters, Or former latest software innovations             For Pleistocene computers,             Seem briefer next to you,             Known as “the only one,” Adwaitya, oldest sentient thing alive By eighty years or more, a tortoise who             Was once the pet of Clive             Of India. That sun Set eons since, through veils of saffron dye             And wafture of a fan, And while you cast a cold chelonian eye             On many a vanished man.             (Not least that lapsed grandee,             The prototypical Nabob and potentate, big gun for hire To profit the East India Company,             That junkie, thief, and liar             Who “owned” you, whose steep fall, Spectacularly public, stunned the nation,             Who did confess, when tried, Astonishment at his own moderation,             Ending a suicide.)             Now you, whose lifespan spanned             Mozart and Bird and Cage, Wordsworth and Motherwell, Turner and Kees, Plus Kean and Keaton, Kierkegaard and Rand,             Forests of old-growth trees,             The whole Industrial Age, Isms galore, old worlds and new world orders,             Epochs and epistemes, Innumerable maps redrawing borders             For botched colonial schemes,             Antediluvian,             Lugging your great domed shell For centuries, have crossed the finish line Alone, one of a kind. Small things began             Your terminal decline:             For months you’d not been well; A crack in your armor festered, gnawed by rats;             Your liver failed; you, too, Succumbed to time, with no more caveats,             Dead at the Alipore Zoo.             Still your trajectory,             From coralline atoll To editorial encomia Upon your death, implies a larger story,             Of how you came to be a             Star of sorts, in the role Of figure for time itself, through silent, sheer             Endurance of life’s stages On a vast, sidereal scale, year after year             Bridging the distant ages.             We fight, we cry, we laugh:             You turn your head and blink And we are gone. Or were. For now you are No longer our living, breathing chronograph,             Or Vishnu’s avatar             (The second one, I think), “Kurma,” the tortoise, sent to earth to plumb             The bottom of the ocean For what we’ve lost. The cold depths. Cthonic. Dumb.             A whole world in slow motion.       To the Republic What have we done, who once were hailed Protectors of humanity And celebrated where we sailed, Whose freedom set the ages free To scheme what better states could be? We’re symbols of a deadlier sort, Bullies despised for cruelty, And I remain despairing of the port. We should have known what war entailed. Our fool imperial fantasy Tried to command the world, and failed. The consequences we now see: Explosions of pure misery, With half a million lives cut short By death throes of democracy, And I remain despairing of the port. Where were the leaders who should have railed Against such blatant idiocy Before we launched this shit? They bailed. Torture and illegality Have turned our country’s policy. To import oil, we must export American hypocrisy, And I remain despairing of the port. The winds grow violent. History Breaks empires on the rocks, for sport. Our sails are rent, we’re lost, at sea, And I remain despairing of the port.   ©