Harm Eden

by Jennifer Nelson

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. Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2021

About the author

Jennifer Nelson is the author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (UDP); Civilization Makes Me Lonely, winner of the Sawtooth Prize (Ahsahta); and Harm Eden (UDP). Her work has appeared in Panda’s Friend, A Perfect Vacuum, Social Text, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; she was the Offen Poet at the University of Chicago in 2020. She is also assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State University Press).

Reviews

[Abigail Zimmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Harm Eden, simulations are run and re-run with the same patterns emerging, classical artists write letters to each other that “miss the point,” overlooking the people who created their materials, the traditions that influence them, and scholars and students in a lecture hall grow desensitized to Black suffering. Apocalypses cannot end, and what we believe is beautiful, pure—our mythos—is layered over ugly practices whose patterns continue in our present. (“how many protections one has / so one doesn’t feel the benefit / from other people’s dying”).

But what Nelson desires for readers is to broaden their thinking, “to tell you something so true / you sing like legs, carrying / our hopelessly binary meaning / in a third direction,” to celebrate difference—“all possible kinds of building, all possible kinds of labor”—and to be part of the “we” that looks at the brokenness of the world and, like Hercules, tears it apart, reshaping it. “We are crazy. We are dangerous.”

[Brainard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feels fresh, feels new, feels different, feels like love, beautiful beautiful writing

[Natalie Mau · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really hate to say it, but this book should not have been published in its current state. There’s a TON of workshopping and editing that still needs to be done to make these poems effective. There are indeed moments where Nelson gives readers a good line or a strong stanza, but those moments are few and far between and most of the poems in this collection feel unfocused and chaotic in a way that does not read as intentional.

I can tell that these poems mean something to Nelson and I really wanted them to mean something to me as well, but more work is needed before they get to that point. Tightening up language and really honing in on what’s driving each poem might be good places to start. Also reconsidering some of the poems’ forms (it felt very elementary in parts) and how the book is structured (WHY is the middle of this book comprised of awful contrapuntal poems? Gimme something better) would also be worthwhile.

I hate to leave such a negative review because, as I said, I can tell that these poems have a heartbeat. Right now, I just can’t hear it.