"I want to say, am failing to say, how astonishingly bright it is: through Harm, you can yet trace the spine of islands on someone’s back, travel a syllabic string, get that kiss, hear the 'pink singing' threading itself through every room, glow with listening, make a naked escape even when the 'limbs [fill] with sand.'"

Poetry Daily

Finalist

2013 California Writers Exchange Award

"Harm, Hillary Gravendyk’s powerful first book of poetry, is a book that resists summary—indeed, one might aptly term it a book of resistances. It offers a record of an event, or of a sequence of micro-events, experienced variously, through positives (registering reality as it appears) and negatives (registering shock—as dismay, but also as wonder). One can assume that facets of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and in particular his emphasis on the body as the site of perception (the body as perception’s human home), have contributed something to the conceptual substance of Gravendyk’s own meticulous attention to the degrees of body and mind by which we live. But the intensities, and the micro-wisdoms that burst from moments she has liberated into exquisite phrases, are indebted not to philosophy but to experience. Harm is a book of awarenesses and sensations; it articulates the micro-wisdoms of that peculiarly timeless condition that is everyday life, the site of lyric embodiment and our extraordinary mortality."

Lyn Hejinian

"Harm encompasses us, a condition of the human. Hillary Gravendyk’s Harm builds a botanica of hurts and healings, ruptures and resolutions. Its prose poems flesh out a world of intention and resemblance, and its exploded lyrics ring with ‘bright sound.’ The poems are beautiful and seek to rethink the beautiful, inviting us into a world that ‘riots and unspools.’"

Elizabeth Willis

"In describing an ancient ritual intended to bring bees back into the hive—to regenerate the empty cells and make them hum again with life—Virgil asks ‘what god was this that fashioned such an art?’ If the life force is a mystery to us today; imagine how it must have seemed then. Despite—or perhaps because of—advancements in technology, medicine might just as well be that kind of sorcery to most of us–a set of spells that, if cast correctly, has the potential to rise to the level of the miraculous. So, too, art and poetry (Apollo’s other gifts to humanity). Why then do we seem to invest less belief in them than we do in science? Look at Hillary Gravendyk’s Harm: is this not proof of the goodness of language; the majestical properties of poetry; the quick electric energy of creation? Here is a little hive buried in the chest, a pulse so vital as to be felt long after any single mortal moment. Here is poetry to persuade us of our own existence, as well as the persistence of our everlasting souls."

D. A. Powell

"'There is a night inside the night inside my chest' speaks a voice in 'Botanica,' the first in a chorus of voices in Harm. They are voices at once intimate and unknown. The intelligence in these poems calls on the natural world and our own inventions for assistance as it climbs, in astonishment and pain, 'the long staircase of wounds.' Its commonality is spread far beyond the human to include plants and creatures of the forest, minerals in the earth; and in its world, everything is conscious and alert, from alphabets and systems of knowledge to the winking eyes of machines. Through these brilliant poems, we are given the power to breathe the air of this world, and the language to imagine it in the 'fourth/color only birds see.'"

Saskia Hamilton