PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA
March 2018
MY BELOVED HAD A VINEYARD
A Poetry Collection
WINNER OF PRIZE AMERICANA
The Poetry Press of Press Americana
ISBN 9780996777971
80 pages
6 x 9
$15.00
Winner of Prize Americana, Ryan Harper's poetry collection, MY BELOVED HAD A VINEYARD, travels through America to remind us who we are and where we come from. Filled with midnight and apple orchards and mountain valleys, his poems surprise and delight with magical ease.
REVIEW
ALFRED CORN: Finding a poetic equivalent for the matter of our United States has been a preoccupation of many poets, Whitman, Williams, Crane, Hughes, and Lowell only the most famous. In Ryan Harper’s work, this same preoccupation takes on a theological inflection, in which matter and spirit must unearth what he calls “real relation." Like Thoreau, like Frederick Law Olmsted, he thrives on the interface between human constructs and the natural world, as he discovers a poetry of sensory accuracy, cogent thinking, verbal intricacy, and rhythmic subtlety. I know of no one in his generation with greater intelligence and finer aesthetic resources. Temperamentally unsuited for lavishing superlatives on poetic debuts, still I can’t avoid feeling that Ryan Harper’s is magisterial and profound. Welcome him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Harper is a visiting assistant professor in New York University’s Religious Studies Program. He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) as well as the poetry chapbook Memphis Left at Cairo (Finishing Line Press, 2013). His writing has appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Review Americana, Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. A native of southeast Missouri, Ryan lives in New York City.
CONTACT INFORMATION
Press Americana
7095-1240 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
editor@americanpopularculture.com
https://americanpopularculture.com
