Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead

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

Excerpt

Click here to read an excerpt from Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.