The Girl and the Gifts, by Colleen S. Harris

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. The poems in The Girl and the Gifts seamlessly weave myth, legend, family history, and love of land and seascape together into a compelling collection asking the reader to hold the tension of the opposites—the sacred and the mundane, the mythic and the quotidian. The poet asks us to interrogate how the family tales we inherit shape us, and how we can make space for ourselves while also paying homage to ancestry, memory, and the injuries and balms of human relationships. These poems invite the reader to explore the way even the most ordinary person’s life has a mythic sweep—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Ireland to Appalachia, and the details of stew seasonings and the hush of a closed library. The Girl and the Gifts employs musical language, perceptive line breaks, and vivid images to deliver a spellbinding experience that encourage readers to pause for a moment and take inventory of the various forces, seen and unseen, that had to align just so to bring them to their present moment. Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and an MA and PhD in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute, among other degrees. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us, These Terrible Sacraments, The Kentucky Vein, God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems, and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone, That Reckless Sound, and Some Assembly Required. Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Cider Press Review, and more than 80 other literary publications. Harris grew up on Long Island and has made her career as an academic librarian in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, California, and most recently Texas, where she serves as Dean of the Sue & Radcliffe Killam Library at Texas A&M International University.