Kirjahaku

Bounce House is a collection of small containers for the uncontainable. Restrained in form but not feeling, Harper's fourth book explores the cyclical nature of grief, imperfect parenting, and our willingness to jump without promise of a safe landing. Measured and meticulously weighted, these poems are playful and poignant as they navigate the strange terrain around losing a loved one: how the past and present blur together, the dead simultaneously here and missing, and how joy moves inevitably forward, as if on wheels.

'What It Feels Like for a Girl' is a book-length series of poems that tell the story of two teenage girls as they delve into the big, strange world of sex. 'What It Feels Like for a Girl' is about many things: the friendships girls have at the most intense times in their lives. Pornography and its "lessons" for the young woman who has never experienced sex in an unfiltered way. What sex and love have to do with each other-if anything. How confusing desire can be. How so many things inthis world are two things at once-thirteen is both young and old, Madonna is both the virgin and the whore, pornography is both arousing and terrifying. How teenage girls (like pornography, literature, art) hold a mirror up to the world and show it its true beautiful, and ugly face. The girls have the kind of friendship only teenage girls have-intense, raw, dependent, playful, and emotional. And beneath the friendship is an attraction for one another, which one girl perceives as love, and the other believes to be a benign crush-nothing of any substance. "Smart, brave, hard-edged, and a little frightening...Jennica Harper offers a compassionate glimpse into the turbulent lives of teenaged girls. May this book find its way to school libraries. May it find itself in the hands of every young person who ever wondered 'What It Feels Like for a Girl'." -Elizabeth Bachinsky

Finalist, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Prizes) Wood is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers - the real, the mythical, the dreamed-up, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud in a tempting world of sex and vice. A young caregiver to a special needs child ponders her romantic future alongside the true meaning of Crimson & Clover. Bess Houdini, married to the world's greatest magician, conjures the children she'll never have. Mad Men's Sally Draper, daughter of a philandering genius, grows up desperately trying to both defy her father and become him. The poems in Wood are playful, surprising, tender, and brave... and universal in their emotional resonance. Praise for Wood: Poetry in Transit selection (poem from the book displayed on Vancouver city buses) Favourite Poetry of 2013, 49th Shelf (Kerry Clare) The Canadian Mad Men Reading List pick, 49th Shelf "... drills to the core of the familiar and the fictional in a nuanced exploration of the makings of a person ... Harper fills WOOD with questions of fertility and family, growth and failure, turning over in tensile language what it means to be real. Rooted, economical, and sharp, Harper's poems blur the line between dramatic monologue and memoir, WOOD hammering out what it is we reach for, what it is we lack." (Poetry is Dead) "Wood is meticulously packaged, the trunk-ring design from the cover repeated on the endpapers.The package is important, first because it's beautiful, but also because Wood is a project of parts rather than strictly a whole and how these parts fit together is a huge part of the book's appeal. ... Wood appears to have emerged from several different projects whose connections were secondary, and yet how these connections functionhow these poems speak to one another, echo one another, underline and overwriteis the book's most compelling quality. It's a kind of puzzle to discern how these pieces fit together, and each reread will unearth a new layer of understanding (or perhaps another ring in the grain?). Which is good reason then to stay up reading late into the night." (Pickle Me This, blog) "While the longings and fears of parents are captured in Wood, it is in the pain and perils of children - wanted or rejected, living up to expectations or running away from their parents - that Harper finds her most powerful voice. In allowing these characters to be glibly, gloriously fictionalized, their narratives become even more authentic." (Quill & Quire) "On Our Radar," 49th Shelf Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2013: Poetry, 49th Shelf A selection from Wood, "The Sally Draper Poems," has been featured in Slate to great acclaim