Dead Man’s Float

"Harrison pours himself into everything he writes...As he navigates his seventies, he continues to marvel with succinct awe and earthly lyricism over the wonders of birds, dogs, and stars as he pays haunting homage to his dead and contends with age's assaults...Bracingly candid, gracefully elegiac, tough, and passionate, Harrison travels the deep river of the spirit, from the wailing precincts of a hospital to a 'green glade of soft marsh grass near a pool in a creek' to the moon-bright sea." –Donna Seaman, Booklist "[Jim Harrison] is still close to the source...Dead Man's Float is, as its title would suggest, a flinty and psalmist look at mortality and wonder."–Los Angeles Times "Mr. Harrison's novels and poems over the last two decades have been increasingly preoccupied with mortality, never so much as in Dead Man's Float, his very good new book of verse. Here he details the shocks of shingles and back surgery, as well as the comprehensive low wheeze of a fraying body... The joys in Mr. Harrison's world have remained consistent. If sex is less frequently an option, his appetites for food and the outdoors are undiminished. In one poem, he goes out into a rainstorm at night and sits naked at a picnic table. In another, he writes: 'I envied the dog lying in the yard/so I did it.'... The title of this volume, Dead Man's Float, refers to a way to stay alive in the water when one has grown tired while far from shore. As a poet, however, Mr. Harrison is not passively drifting. He remains committed to language, and to what pleasures he can catch."–Dwight Garner, The New York Times