Mostly the Wind is full of far-reaching images and lines that leap. For Harn, himself a "heartbeat explorer," connecting is the point - with the universe, with people here and gone, with the reader... which is, ultimately, nothing less than love. In these turbulent times, I am grateful for the calm moments of delight and the humble tone that permeate these poems.
-Carol Durak, author of Enter Here
Harn's newest collection is a calendar of revelations where seemingly mundane events become portals to the sacred. He reminds us to be alert to enigmatic moments.
-Frank Rossini, author of Last Confession and Midnight the Blues
About the Author :
John Harn was raised in Michigan and lived his adult life in Oregon. His first full-length collection, Physics for Beginners, won the 2017 Blue Light Book Award and was published that year in San Francisco. His second collection, Witness (Kelsay Books), appeared in 2019. Now retired, he worked with international students for three decades in the US and abroad as a teacher and administrator. He's taught poetry workshops at the University of Oregon, Pacific University and the Oregon State Penitentiary and was a Teaching Artist at The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He has exhibited poems in several art galleries in Oregon and currently hosts the Studio 7 Poetry Reading Series in Eugene. His poems have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, Chicago Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Miramar, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, South Carolina Review, Spillway and other journals. Married to Etsuko Matsunaga, he is the father of three grown daughters.
Review :
John Harn navigates the everyday world with a photojournalist's eye. Small human gestures are miraculous acts, a bedeviling universe is a serious playground. Mostly the Wind brims with the evanescent pleasure of discovery.
-David Wyatt, author of Gathering Place and Evening All of a Sudden
The attention of the soul to the smallest details combines with honesty, hope and a metaphysical subtext to make John Harn's new book exceptional. He masters the lyric elegy, and through it an empathy for our common mortality and our short, radiant time on earth.
-Christopher Buckley, Editor of Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets, Interviews & Essays
