Harm.

"You'll want to stop right now and read this book. No day should be without its adamancy, its invention, its honesty. Its edge of defiance, mixed with triumph, operates like a spotlight on human possibility. Always veering just out of sense on a curve of sound, Willard's is a voice that not only has something new to say but that has also has found a new way to say it. This is language at the speed of life."—Cole Swensen, author of The Book of a Hundred Hands

"Canny interrogations of the doubled thinking recognition is, exemplary instances of a deep attention to the way, say, "the waves as they come rolling in unbanded stay / scrolled off a heart," the poems in Steve Willard's first collection work the fine and lively edges where subject & object are involved in each other's uneasy invention. Harm. (and we should heard the charm & harmony here as well as the hurt, as well as a broken ghost of the title of Wallace Stevens' first book) sounds eerily into its equally desperate and delicate song a dense "reverberance" of all kinds of kindness "until a nature, neither of this world or a next net's, / attends us, does not exist." An urgently necessary and original book."—Laura Mullen, author of Subject