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    Harborless
    Harborless
    Harborless
    Ebook81 pages34 minutes

    Harborless

    By Cindy Hunter Morgan

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    About this ebook

    Harborless, a collection of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, is part history and part reinvention. The poems explore tragic wrecks in rivers and lakes, finding and forming artistic meaning from destruction and death. Each poem begins in a real, historical moment that Cindy Hunter Morgan transforms into an imagined truth. The imaginative element is essential to this work as it provides a previously unseen glimpse into the lives affected by shipwrecks. The poems in Harborless confront the mysteries surrounding the objects that cover the floor of the Great Lakes by both deepening our understanding of the unknown and teaching great empathy for a life most of us will never know.

    Morgan creates a melodic and eerie scene for each poem, memorializing ships through lines such as, “Fishermen wondered why they caught Balsam and Spruce / their nets full of forests, not fish,” and “They touched places light could not reach.” Most of the poems are titled after the name of a ship, the year of the wreck, and the lake in which the ship met disaster. The book’s time frame spans from wrecks that precede the Civil War to those involving modern ore carriers. Throughout this collection are six “Deckhand” poems, which give face to a fully imagined deckhand and offer a character for the reader to follow, someone who appears and reappears, surfacing even after others have drowned. Who and what is left behind in this collection speaks to finality and death and “things made for dying.” Very little is known when a ship sinks other than the obvious: there was a collision, a fire, a storm, or an explosion. Hunter works to fill in these gaps and to keep these stories alive with profound thoughtfulness and insight.

    Tony Hoagland said that one of the powers of poetry is to locate and assert value. This collection accomplishes that task through history and imagination, producing lake lore that will speak to historians and those interested in ships, poetry, and the Great Lakes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWayne State University Press
    Release dateMar 6, 2017
    ISBN9780814342435
    Harborless
    Author

    Cindy Hunter Morgan

    Cindy Hunter Morgan teaches creative writing and book arts at Michigan State University. She is also the author of two chapbooks: The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker, which won The Ledge Press 2011 Poetry Chapbook Competition, and Apple Season, which won the Midwest Writing Center’s 2012 Chapbook Contest, judged by Shane McCrae.

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      Book preview

      Harborless - Cindy Hunter Morgan

      Advance praise for Harborless

      "In Cindy Hunter Morgan’s elegant collection, Harborless, the unique power of historic poetry is on full display. These meticulous and striking poems balance imagination and fact to explore the complex maritime narratives of the Great Lakes. The result is an important and refreshing book full of unexpected histories and wonder."

      —Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke

      "Here, a shipload of cast iron stoves slips to the bottom of the lake, where it will rest forever among the teacups, the crankshafts, the revolvers, and the bones of sailors. On one level, Cindy Hunter Morgan’s Harborless is a deft and moving chronicle of forty shipping catastrophes in the Great Lakes, described with loving attention to detail, to the tiny particulars that create our sense of a whole story. But on a greater level, this is also a book about the transience of human experience, the vagaries of memory, and the forces that buffet all of us, often wildly and violently, during and after our lives. Harborless is a brilliant first book, one that will continue to haunt me."

      —Kevin Prufer, co-curator of The Unsung Masters Series

      MADE IN MICHIGAN WRITERS SERIES

      General Editors

      Michael Delp

      Interlochen Center for the Arts

      M. L. Liebler

      Wayne State University

      Advisory Editors

      Melba Joyce Boyd

      Wayne State University

      Stuart Dybek

      Western Michigan University

      Kathleen Glynn

      Jerry Herron

      Wayne State University

      Laura Kasischke

      University of Michigan

      Thomas Lynch

      Frank Rashid

      Marygrove College

      Doug Stanton

      Keith Taylor

      University of Michigan

      A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      © 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

      21 20 19 18 17            5 4 3 2 1

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4242-8 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-0-8143-4243-5 (e-book)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943657

      Publication of this book was made possible by a generous gift from The Meijer Foundation. Additional support provided by Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and National Endowment for the Arts.

      Designed and typeset by Libby Bogner, Good Done Daily

      Composed in Fazeta Serif and Fazeta Sans

      Wayne State University Press

      Leonard N. Simons Building

      4809 Woodward Avenue

      Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

      Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

      CONTENTS

      Acknowledgments

      Deckhand: Scent Theory

      Henry Steinbrenner, 1909

      W. W. Arnold, 1869

      Erie, 1841

      Chicora, 1895

      Rouse Simmons, 1912

      Philadelphia, 1893

      J. Oswald Boyd, 1936

      Deckhand: Sound Theory

      Myron, 1919

      Charles S. Price, 1913

      Superior, 1856

      Daniel J. Morrell, 1966

      Phoenix, 1847

      Pewabic, 1865

      Brewster, 1943

      Deckhand: Game Theory

      Two Hundred Forty-Seven Ships, 1926

      Lady Elgin, 1860

      Henry Clay, 1851

      William Nottingham, 1913

      Hattie Taylor, 1880

      Francisco Morazan, 1960

      J. Barber,

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