Play Dead - Paperback

by Francine J. Harris (Author)

Lyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence-a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."

"francine j. harris's poems are tenderized: they not only insist upon their embodiment, they punch, howl, beat, and bleed their way into being."

-Boston Review

"...The poems in [play dead] provide scrappy, cunning, and inventive methods of survival."

-Drunken Boat

Author Biography

francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also Cave Canem fellow who has lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.