This Being Done by Stephanie L. Harper

In This Being Done, Stephanie L. Harper‘s brilliant debut collection, we traverse landscapes, both internal and external, through rigorous yet informal language in which misunderstandings morph into endings that of course never end. We see a child’s trauma transformed into beautifully fierce motherhood. We see fear and honor, love and bravery. We see wonder and truth, and everything arrives through a kaleidoscopic lens of disquieting honesty and intelligence. This is writing to be savored, the work of a mature and remarkable poet.

–Robert Okaji, author of From Every Moment a Second.

Stephanie L. Harper‘s poems have a rare combination of high linguistic skill, deeply felt experience, and strongly earned insights. Her style asks for slow attention and rewards it with our old English made new and distinctive. The poems of This Being Done call upon mythical and mundane registers in a consistent and warranted way that always feels mutually enhancing, never forced or superficial. Every poem brings the reader somewhere—to lectionary pleasure and some wisdom, yes, and also to a moment that is both prepared for and surprising. Those moments to which a whole poem bends are the essence of poetic form, here executed in a sinewy and distinctive free verse. The collection’s themes of birth and death, resistance to abuse, and the wonders of atypical cognition are strongly grounded in a woman’s bodily experience. Powerfully felt, powerfully thought, and powerfully written.

–Rebecca Raphael, Professor of Religious Studies, Texas State University

Stephanie L. Harper‘s This Being Done invites us into our own humanity, both to celebrate and commiserate over the human condition. One moment, we nod our heads and chuckle at the beautiful inanity of daily life; the next, our eyes blur and our throats burn as we relate to the intensity of parental love, or recognize the weight of childhood trauma. Harper weds the ordinary to the philosophical in a way that lends a universal voice to those deeply private and so often inarticulable moments of questioning one’s identity and purpose. With language that is at once fresh and familiar, these poems arrive at an intimacy that is the very enduring heart of poetry.

–Ericka Goerling, Ph.D., Professor of psychology in Portland, Oregon