Driving Out from Pudding House Publications
Sixteen poems which make lyrical observations about what we see when we leave home
Kiss Kiss
In an era when poets often seem to want to mention in passing that they know a street name in Budapest or an art piece in the museum at Fez, Linda Lee Harper gracefully-sometimes humorously-returns us to the world of people and places we know. Kiss, Kiss is our lives-our neighbors, aunts, lovers, our work and recreation where we find good and bad, and muddle through somehow. "Oh yes," we say poem after poem, "I had forgotten." What a delight these living poems are.
Paul Allen, author of AMERICAN CRAWL (UNT Press, 1997 winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize)
Kiss Kiss
Forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center
2007 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Competition Winner, chosen from among 658 manuscripts entered in this year’s contest by 625 poets.
Toward Desire
1995 Word Works, Winner of Washington Prize in Poetry
“The narrator, intensely aware of her characters’ specific joys and pains, comments on the complex interweaving of fate, hubris, and final self-knowledge in
Toward Desire’s rich brocade of voice and event. Accounts of family violence, love, betrayal, and redemption achieve the feel of myth.”
--Lynn Emanuel, author of Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then Suddenly
Blue Flute
Adastra Press, 1999
"Thinner, denser and tight, tight, tight is Linda Lee Harper’s
The Blue Flute. Harper’s images hit you like a hit and run driver. Sure there are a few abuse poems here, but Harper is not harping on the abuser, nor wailing from scars left behind. Her poems are more like takes from Polanski’s Chinatown. The evil seeps out of them, sometimes seconds, sometimes hours later, like a black eye or a bruise surfacing. I love the ominous third persons, the hims and hers of many of the poems. These are not poems about Harper, so much as they are about anyone. The title when discovered, is sharper than other images before it, like ' ...and the two of them drove off/ into the sunset orange as Gulf Oil signs... ' or ' ...like ice you seethe with latent heat... '"
--Welter’s Bookshelf, The Midwest Book Review
