Identity Theft

The poems in Joseph Harrison’s second collection, Identity Theft, map the erosions and betrayals of selfhood, both cyberspace-age and age-old. If the high-speed title poem and the other menacing “Trajectories” of the book’s first section register the disintegration of identity under contemporary pressures, social and technological, the focus of the book’s second sequence, “Odes and Elegies,” is more personal and retrospective, dealing with the curtailment of identity by loss and encroaching mortality. The third section’s “Tropes” suggest that language and art, which might seem to hold the promise of preserving something of the self, transform those who use them beyond recognition, while some of the final section’s “Odes” put our current identity crisis in a longer historical perspective. Identity Theft pursues these concerns through poems in a variety of forms, displaying a range of scale, tone, and subject, poems that are funny yet serious, informed by the past but fully present, both idiosyncratic and resonant.

praise for Identity Theft (2008):

“How deeply satisfying it is to read a poet whose meditative, elegiac temperament is married happily to verbal wit, even laugh-out-loud humor. Joseph Harrison is that rare poet, one whose command of craft suits him equally to produce a two line ‘Ode’ (‘O elevated visionary thoughts, / Where are you now?’) and a ten-page public poem (‘To George Washington in Baltimore’) on that American giant who understood the ‘human scale.’ A poet so giddy with wordplay that he dares to rhyme ‘my palm is piloted’ with ‘Pontius Pilated’ and ‘pirated,’ Harrison addresses nonetheless the most serious concerns. Wary of our technology-dominated present and future, in which ‘identity theft’ is no joke (and ‘what fave new world is beckoning?’), Harrison makes his fingerprint evident in all of these poems–an implicit affirmation of something unique in each of us.” — Mary Jo Salter

“The title poem of Joseph Harrison’s second book is a witty and headlong discussion of how one’s self, if any, is constituted. We are a patchwork, it develops, and the same might be said of Harrison’s book, which makes continual and expert use of Spenser, Wordsworth, Horace, Villon, and other predecessors. If this makes Identity Theft seem a three-ring circus, the important point is that Harrison is a superlative ringmaster: his book throughout is governed by that playfulness and performance which, as Frost said, are required in poetry however impassioned or serious. I found myself particularly moved by ‘Who They Were,’ which recalls the poet’s mother and father in the stanza of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam.’” — Richard Wilbur

“Joseph Harrison’s new volume is a wonderful leap in his poetic development. Harrison fuses formal control with a rich interiority and composes many poems that deserve to become canonical.” — Harold Bloom