Shortlisted for the CAA Award for Poetry

Having taken over a decade to write, Erina Harris' first full-length work comprises two serial poems or "Books" within which individual poems stand on their own, and also refract amongst themselves, building, within each Book, its own careful language. Harris engages historic modes such as the sonnet and the elegy, song and nonsense verse traditions, the fairy tale, and various theatrical traditions, and then deploys postmodernist poetic devices to introduce new questions regarding the ways traditional forms and the ideas these represent demand reinvention. Here, she stretches sonnet and elegy forms, asking if these can engage communities of interconnected voices, and if so, how must they be reimagined? Responding to contemporary discussions ranging from feminist poetics to ecopoetics, Book One employs the trope of childhood and nonsense verse to consider human relationships with sense, place and animals. In Book Two, the elegy becomes an interminable thing. It enacts a grieving and harmed song-play mourning the suicide of a close female friend and attempts to express the condition of grief through a community of mourners. Throughout, the device of rhyme is innovatively reborn as part of Erina's continuous interest, as poet and scholar, in the phenomenon of rhyme.

Erina Harris' profile page

Erina Harris is a Canadian poet. A native of Waterloo, Ontario, she has lived in Iowa and Calgary. She has connections with the poetry and academic communities throughout Canada and the USA. She has devoted the past decade to the writing, study, thinking, and rewriting of this first collection, The Stag Head Spoke. Her work has been published in North America, England and Slovenia (also in translation). It has received multiple prizes, including the New Writer Competition (England), the Norma Epstein Award placement (University of Toronto), and the THIS Magazine Great Literary Hunt Award winner, ARC Editor's Choice Poem). Her short-list nominations include the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, the Ralph Gustafson Award, and the Air Canada Award. She also is the recipient of several international writers' residency awards. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Fellowship recipient, she is now pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Calgary.

"Harris's poetry was haunting and highly refined. Drawing on the traditions of a wide variety of forms (such as the sonnet and the fairy tale) to explore rhyme in new ways, Harris has created an atmospheric set of poems, delivered in an even yet ethereal tone." - The Town Crier

"For people who have been involved in the local arts scene for ten years or more, the name that stands out here is Erina Harris, who began her writing career here in Waterloo, and who made a lasting contribution to creative enterprise in this region through her work as a dedicated, creative, and energetic Arts and Culture Coordinator for the City of Kitchener." - TheRecord.com

"The Stag Head Spoke, by Erina Harris, is a decade in the making and described as 'part Mother Goose, part Anne Carson.'" - 49th Shelf