Harm Eden

Author: Jennifer Nelson Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2021) Harm Eden is about how our fucked-up present-day civilization is built on originary and timeless systemic damage. The fantasy of nature and/or art as echoes of a purer creation reinforces this foundation all the more. This book attempts to think through and simultaneously away from this evil fantasy and the civilization it upholds by exploiting the tension between history and poetry. "Beginning with an invocation to Clio, the muse of history, Jennifer Nelson's Harm Eden reaches for the muse's hand, stands amid the rubble of our collective mythologies and origin stories, and surveys the damage with a wry, irreverent intelligence. In Nelson's poems art collapses time, but time is unruly; it invariably reconstitutes, resists human interventions, upturns the illusion of linearity and progress. 'I know what time looks like,' Nelson writes with unsettling defiance, 'I have to believe the right world follows,' even as what follows