On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood

• *Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry*
  
• *Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry*
  
• *Winner of the 3rd Prize for Poetry in the 2017 Alcuin Society's Book Design Awards*
  
• *Shortlisted for the City of Calgary 2016 W.O. Mitchell Book Prize*
  
• *Finalist for the Poetry category of the High Plains Book Awards*

• Wilted Vegetables and Hope (MLA Chernoff, Canadian Literature, 11/10/2018)
  "The focus of the text, then, is not so much on the values of patriarchy or Oedipality in themselves, but rather our memories and impressions of these steadfast ideologies in the wake of their absences. Harrison deconstructs the labour of loss, exploding the question of who mourns whom, while interrogating masculinities. The poet is thus critical and elegiac in the same breath, carving out for readers a "paradise / on the other side of criticism" – a site of ambiguous splendour that locates joy in the reading and rereading of one’s own life."
  
• Power of the Poets (Phil R., Calgary Public Library, 11/04/2018)
  "This testament to poetry's connective power brought the Governor General's Award for Poetry to Calgary last year."
  
• Review of On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood (Jannie Edwards, Freefall, Winter 2018)
  "These lines of poetry, these repetitions are not echoes, not cover songs, but rather in the struggle of tensions and opposites, in the pull between the discontent of winter and the glory of summer, poetry becomes a mirror, becomes a map, becomes the psyche's barometer, a way into understanding indentity and intimacy."
  
• Well-crafted poems highlight book (Danell Jones, Billings Gazette, 14/07/2017)
  "Harrison’s poems will sing to you long after you have closed this poignant book."
  
• Bookshelf: On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood (Alex Rettie, Alberta Reviews, 01/07/2017)
  "The poems are not retrospective so much as they are what we might call intraspective, examining themselves and each other for signs of permanence at the same time as they acknowledge their impermanence."
  
• "Review: On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood" (Sharon Berg, League of Canadian Poets, 03/09/2017)
  "The beauty in this book, what brings it close to being a gem, is the writer’s ability to craft a vision of his inner struggle through personal dilemma that jointly allows the reader to address their own internal inquiry. That vulnerability, that openness, is what makes the poems in this volume ring."
  
• "Today's Book of Poetry" (Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry, 02/09/2017)
  "These gentle and compassionate poems are made of interlocking puzzle pieces so meticulously set into place and rendered that the seams become invisible."
  
• "Two from Buckrider 2016" (Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews, 12/02/2016)
  "Harrison has certainly delivered true infant gleamings of awe and sorrow in what is undoubtedly among the most searing poetry collections of 2016."
  
• Compelling Calgarians: Richard Harrison (Rita Mingo, The Calgary Herald, 02/01/2018)
  "When the attention comes . . . to a very private spot of my life . . . it becomes a shared public happiness. It means so many things on so many levels."
  
• It is to that bedside I go by Richard Harrison (Richard Harrison, CBC Books, 01/12/2017)
  "And when you ask me about chaos and control, it is to that bedside that I go when I think about these words for the great powers in human life in both the large sense and the small. They go by many names: the predictable and the unpredictable, the known and the unknown, the familiar and the strange, those that answer human will, and those that no quantity of will or desire affects. "
  
• Richard Harrison's On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood wins Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry (Eric Volmers, The Calgary Herald, 02/11/2017)
  "He was teaching me his whole life," says Harrison. "And, with his dying, he was teaching me the last thing I needed to know — which was that poetry or art was our answer to death."
  
• "Calgary Bestsellers: Non-fiction" (Calgary Herald, 26/11/2016)
  On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood was #1 on the Calgary non-fiction bestseller list.

Richard Harrison’s eight books include the Governor General’s Award–finalist Big Breath of a Wish, and Hero of the Play, the first book of poetry launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, a position he took up after being the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary in 1995. His work has been published, broadcast and displayed around the world, and his poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. In On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood, Richard reflects on his father’s death, the Alberta Flood and what poetry offers a life lived around it.