Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
Erina Harris
October 15, 2024
184 pages | ISBN 978-1-998408-03-0
In Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead, Erina Harris works with fairy tales, children’s literature, mythology and feminist literary history to ask important questions of gender, of queerness, of misogyny and of the role of art in social change. These are brilliant, innovative poems, where Harris displays an exceptional mastery of both traditional and experimental forms to examine versions of our endangered future. Vibrant, disruptive and always questioning, Harris invites us all to upend tradition and engage deeply with the modern world.
Advance Praise
“Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead sets the alphabet up like a game of dominoes, then lets it cascade. Quotations echo, queens’ heads roll, crinolines rasp and Chloes tease Olivias. This repeating abecedarian plies the history of nonsense verse, layering play with power play.” – Sarah Dowling, author of Entering Sappho
“Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead is a book of gorgeous music that reinvents the architecture of our formation – rhyme, nonsense, myths and nursery rhymes. Harris brilliantly reimagines the stories that accompany us as we grow into language, and, further, her new work reimagines the possibilities of our growing. In poems and notes exploring new forms of flourishing, Harris articulates an ethics of profound collaboration, of an intertextual, subversive relationality. Articulating this necessary interconnection, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead invites us to attend to and sing what is ‘incantatory from within.’” – Julie Joosten, author of Nought
“Read these ear-spun and ribald reports from the rustling femme multiverse
(otherwise known as one’s many-named ancestress)
with sweetest pleasure inversions
as wet maps to raucous underworlds.
Her rippling song sluice’s
Dolly’s formally abundant play’s
shatterment, like, better, eruditer, hilarious:
For those who prefer
Rime Shapely.” – Lisa Robertson, author of The Baudelaire Fractal and Nilling
Articles
Beautiful Books: A chat with Kilby Smith-McGregor, designer of Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead (All Lit Up, 23/01/2025)
Designer and “reluctant maximalist” Kilby Smith-McGregor walks us through the cover design process for Erina Harris's collection of poetry
16 Books for Women’s History Month 2024 (All Lit Up, 02/10/2024)
We're delighted to see Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead on this wonderful list.
2024 Fall Preview: Short Fiction, Graphic Novels, and Poetry (Quill & Quire, 31/07/2024)
Erina's collection makes this fabulous list.
Excerpt
Click here to read an excerpt from Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.
About the Author
Erina Harris is a Canadian writer, educator and mentor. Her first book, The Stag Head Spoke (Buckrider Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry. A graduate and Fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has been published widely, translated and awarded multiple prizes including international residencies. She lives and teaches in Edmonton, Alberta.
OTHER TITLES BY THIS AUTHOR
The Stag Head Spoke (2014)
