Poetry. Ed Harkness is very good at shining the poet's light on natural details and puts this to good use in poems that go outside his more familiar environs, such as looking at the English Channel: "The Channel looks benign,/a road of hammered silver. Unglamorous,/windswept, this beach is no Riviera./Here you feel the slap of the beyond." And, looking even farther: "the Dog Star, lifting its drowsy head,//guarding the dog house of heaven/with its one yellow eye." Harkness extends his range when addressing social issues: "but the horde of you—the majority—/have gone remote control,/ignorant of our sacrifices..." Ed Harkness does not squint when he looks at the world and we are rewarded with a full and multi-leveled world in these poems.

Author City: SEATTLE, WA USA

Ed Harkness grew up in Seattle and still lives not far from his childhood home. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including most recently Syringa in Twilight (Red Wing Press, 2010). Saying the Necessary, his first full-length collection, was published by Pleasure Boat Studio in 2000. His poems can be found in print journals including Fine Madness, Great River Review, The Humanist, Midwest Quarterly, Seattle Review and others. His work has also appeared in several pioneering online literary journals, including Mudlark, Switched-on Gutenberg, and Salt River Review. Harkness lives with his wife, Linda, in Shoreline, WA, where he teaches writing at Shoreline Community College. He's the proud father of two grown sons, Devin and Ned.