| The Bad Secret takes readers on a dark yet sometimes
comic sojourn through the undercurrents of a life suddenly
unmoored by grief, and then to the subsequent rise of the
spirit to recovery. Tough-minded and intellectual, Judith
Harris's poems are also distinguished by brilliant images
close to metaphysical. They reflect on childhood, nature,
mental and physical illness, the loss of a mother, and the
levity of being simply human. In a voice entirely her own,
Harris confronts life's secrets with their hidden meanings
inspired by guilt and redemption, offering a music of tenderness
and hope.
I watch it gutter down, over the pine's edge, over the
pink and orange sunset, diving into the abyss, with its
wings perpendicular to the ravine. By now, I have broken
off from the rest, pretending I'm an orphan— my eyes fixed
on the unseeable destruction
of my ghost in that suicidal machine. "Hush," I say, as
if hatred was a sound, as if I could make the negative positive,
but nature itself has given up on the picture of my happy
family, and pretends not to look at the box with the rolled-up
Kodak film tumbling over the ledge
—"My Father Throws His Camera Down the Grand Canyon, 1968"
Judith Harris is the author of the poetry
collection Atonement and the critical work Signifying
Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing.
She teaches creative writing, literature, and psychoanalytic
theory at Catholic University and George Mason University
and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter.
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