Joseph Harms’s newest collection of poetry was recently released from IFSF Publishing (April 30, 2021). Nous explores young love and the adulterants (bad parents, violence, alcohol, heroin, prison, maturation) that both heighten and inevitably truncate it. It also looks into divorce (from spouse, oneself, the world) and in doing so becomes a search beyond love’s bounds and bonds for meaning. Nous includes poems that first appeared in The Opiate, Bayou Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Leveler, Floor Plan Journal, Quail Bel Magazine, Vector Press, Radius: Poetry from the Center to the Edge, as well as The Gravity of the Thing’s Spring 2016 issue.
Praise for Nous:
“In Nous, Joseph Harms introduces us to a language and a vision for which we’ve waited. Each poem is a spell, a charm. Wild with words, like Dylan Thomas, but as careful in craft as any great poet has ever been. This poet’s work transcends, with music and image, our human existence. Harms is an alchemist, a soothsayer, a songwriter and a healer. Nous is hypnotic, mystical. This is poetry written from its most mind-bending heights and supernaturally darkest depths. You’ve not read a book like this before.”
—Laura Kasischke
“Joseph Harms is one of those rare poets who is truly inventing his own language. His poems are thickly populated sonic events that manage to plumb existential depths in weirdly ordinary settings. Most of all, it’s clear that this is a poet who loves—I mean loves—words. I’ve never read anything like Harms’s work; each time I encounter it, I emerge with better questions, wilder memories, and a fiercer devotion to all that poetic language can do.”
—Franny Choi
About the author:
Joseph Harms was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Award for Bel (Expat Press, 2017), as well as a finalist for the Sexton Prize for Poetry for Goety (The Black Spring Press Group, forthcoming). He is the author of the novels Ades, Baal, Cant and Wyrd, which have been collected in Evil: Novels 2007-2018 (Expat Press, forthcoming). Harms’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Boulevard, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The North American Review, The International Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, The Opiate, and Bayou Magazine. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program.