Read Lois Marie Harrod's Story "Echo Works at Queequegs"
Read Lois Marie Harrod Poems on Web
Read poems from Lois Marie Harrod's The Only Is,  winner of the Tennessee Chapbook Contest
Read poems from Lois Marie Harrod's Brief Term, 2011
Link to my Blog (an interview about Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis)
Link to Cool Women blog

        Lois Marie Harrod's 13th collection Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis is forthcoming from Cherry Grove Press in February 2013, http://www.cherry-grove.com/harrod.html.

What's Being Said:

Do be careful with these poems, made of velvet and razorblades, hunger and anger, need and greed, family and scenery and     mystery. Mystery and a crisp sharp music. Mystery with history walking fluently behind it. And cosmogony ahead of it like a white snow cloud shading a volcano. Do read these lyrical and powerfulpoems, and as Lois Marie Harrod suggests in the poem “Catchingthe Deer,” “maybe today/ you will stop dying.”–Alicia Ostriker, author of The Book of Life and The Book of Seventy

  Lois Marie Harrod’s powerful new collection flows like the ocean from which its avenging heroine, Nemesis, emerges “like a word rising from a pond.”  The poem seems to arise dripping from snow and mist and root itself firmly in clay, earth and sand, where it blossoms “knowing, as I did not, what it desires,” and in this transformation, “what has been grief becomes ground.”  These are poems rich in bright, fresh images that startle and then settle down into their perfect shapes.–Gail Entrekin, editor, Canary (www.hippocketpress.org/canary) and author, Rearrangement of the Invisible

A deceptive evenness dominates Lois Harrod’s Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis—an evenness of stanza, of tone. But the reader soon clings to this steadiness, this solidity, because these poems are determined to convince us how partial and unexpected the world is. “Open this sentence carefully” the poems advise, and “look how the ledge gives way.” Indeed, one of the primary pleasures of poetry is seeing how quickly the known and unknown can switch places. Harrod’s considerable accomplishment is in capturing these elemental transitions for us. “Maybe I do not need to tell you how the sun becomes water,” the poem says, but our great fortune is that Harrod does tell. On every page.–Catie  Rosemurgy, author of The Stranger Manual

Cover Image:  Sculpture Hera and Zeus II, Carole Feuerman

The Needle Sings to the Book 2011
Mario Laplante (artist) Lois Marie Harrod (poet), USA


Learn more about the Mutanabi Project, which I am so pleased to be part of: The Mutanabi Project

Read "The Needle Sings to the Book"

Lois Marie Harrod's 11th book Brief Term, narratives from a life of teaching, has just been published by Black Buzzard Press.

Click Here for Poems

Read a poem from Harrod's The Only Is, Winner of the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest.

Read Poems by Lois Marie Harrod on the Internet

Read poems from Harrod's Cosmogony, winner of the 2010 Flyway Chapbook Contest.

Read Poems from Brief Term

What's Being Said about Brief Term

“Funny, wrenching, and compassionate, often wildly imaginative and full of wordplay, these poems

show us the bewildering intersection of lives and histories that is a high school classroom. Lois Marie

Harrod’s great skill in creating from her rich experience as poet and teacher a wide range of voices--especially those of teenage students and the imaginary teacher Alice Ann--makes Brief Term a

truly rewarding collection.”

–Judy Rowe Michaels, poet and teacher, Reviewing the Skull

“Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection Brief Term gives us quick studies of the classroom, depicting the

joys and limitations of teaching high school. Stunning, marvelously honest, Harrod’s elegies and odes

burnish with compassion and wisdom. Her dedication to poetry and education is apparent in every

gorgeous line.

–Denise Duhamel, poet and professor, Kinky and Ka-Ching!

“This book will take you on a roller coaster of life in the classroom crucible, slowly climbing the steep

stuff, gasping, getting big views, then tumbling, roaring down, almost in free fall, executing turns that

defy physics. The pages turn as you pummel through the tunnel of dark love and the Poet takes you

off the fixed track of narrative, sometimes leaving the rails, but not the third rail. But read on, dear

reader, for you are the fortunate, willing, wily, complicit passenger in this ride, as a former student and sometime teacher yourself.”

–Scott McVay, founding executive director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Bio

Lois Marie Harrod won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize 2012 (Poems& Plays) with her manuscript The Only Is. Her 11^th book Brief Term, poems about teaching, was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her chapbook Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backwards (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 400 of her poems have been published online and in print journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she She presently teaches Creative Writing and supervises student teachers at The College of New Jersey as well as teaches in the Evergreen Forum at Princeton Senior Resource Center.

You Missed:

Lois Marie Harrod's publication party for Brief Term, Friday, April 8, Suzanne K. Paterson Bldg., Princeton, NJ.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Major Jackson at Bucks County Community College. http://www.buckslocalnews.com/articles/2010/11/09/entertainment/theater/doc4cd993c849b98504774784.txt, December 4, 2010.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women, Sunday September 19, 2010, 2 pm. South Brunswick Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction, NJ.

Lois Marie Harrod reading Sunday, October 3, 2010, at the Spoken Word Series, DeBaun Center for The Performing Arts, 500 Hudson St., Hoboken, NJ.

Lois Marie Harrod reading 7 pm, Monday, October 25, 2010 at Moons Art Center, 110 South 13th Street, Philadelphia.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women, 2 pm, Saturday, November 6 at Tulipwood, 1165 Hamilton Street Somerset, New Jersey.

Lois Marie Harrod reading at The Unitarian Universal Fellowship Hall, 1 West Nelson Street, Newton, New Jersey 07806, 862-268-2954. February 2, 2010. 7 pm.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Madeline Tiger, Sunday, March 21, 2010, 2 p.m., South Brunswick Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction, NJ

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women at Grounds for Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Road, Trenton, NJ, 3 pm, May 16, 2010.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Patricia Goodrich, at Barnes & Noble, Route 1, Princeton, NJ, 7:30 for Delaware Valley Poets. OCTOBER 12, 2009.

Lois Marie Harrod reading at the Bridgewater Public Library for the SOMERSET POETRY GROUP

1 Vogt Drive, Bridgewater, NJ
 (908) 526-4016. For further information contact Bob Rosenbloom at bloom306@yahoo.com

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women at Cool Women's Book Launch, Cool Women Volume 4, Princeton Arts Center, Princeton, N. J., DECEMBER 4, 2009.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women at Windrows, 2000 Windrow Dr., Princeton, NJ 08540 June 23, 3 pm.

Laura McCullough, Nancy Scott and Lois Marie Harrod reading Thursday, November 20. Middletown Township Public Library, 55 New Monmouth Rd., Middletown, NJ. 7:00 PM

Juditha Dowd and Lois Marie Harrod reading December 12, 2008, 8 pm, at Newtown Public Library Poetry Series, 114 Centre Avenue, Newtown, PA 18940, 215-968-7659. For further info contact Kathleen Mulholland, 215-968-4843.

Juditha Dowd and Lois Marie Harrod reading December 12, 2008, 8 pm, at Newtown Public Library Poetry Series, 114 Centre Avenue, Newtown, PA 18940, 215-968-7659. For further info contact Kathleen Mulholland, 215-968-4843.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women at The Raconteur Bookstore, on January 30, 2008, at 8 pm. 431 Main Street, Metuchen, NJ. www.raconteurbooks.com.

Lois Marie Harrod reading with Cool Women Thursday, February 26, Middletown Township Public Library, 55 New Monmouth Rd., Middletown, NJ. 7:00 PM.