This review has been published by FreeFall Magazine (December 2024)
Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead
by Erina Harris
Wolsak & Wynn (2024)
Academic and poet, Erina Harris, has several interests and concerns, many find their way into the subjects and themes of her second poetry collection, Trading Beauty Secrets with the Dead.
According to Harris’ profile on the University of Alberta website, where she teaches, her research interests include fairy tales, rhyme and nonsense verse, gender and women’s writing, subjectivity and relationality, experimentalism and more. Given this array, Harris meets the organizational challenge of creating a cohesive collection by structuring the poems into an abecedarium. But the complex weaving of varied subjects and themes into a whole is not the only thing that readers will notice. As in her first book, The Stag Head Spoke, the poetry here is highly original and experimental.
Readers are treated to rhyme and nonsense verse, word-play and music, a taste of Dadaism and Surrealism among other isms. The poems are subversive. They inform, create context for her research interests, while shifting perspective in unusual ways. They play with form, structure, ideas – and in the case of “Letter B: Bestiary Rondo” with sound.
… in the breath, in the breeze, that the breathing beasts
breathe in, the breaths of the bees breathing trees’ breaths, the
breeze breathes the bee-breaths with trees breathing beast-
breaths, breath breezes in beast-breathing bees breathe the
bee-breath-ing trees in the breath-tree will be in the breeze of
the bee in the tree-bees will breathe with breeze-breaths will
beasts bleed …[Da Capo] (3)
Harris is a skillful weaver of words.
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Kathryn MacDonald 