Fortress of Chairs

Such a beautiful book, so full of emotion and inventiveness....

--Pierre Nepvue, editor, Spirale

[In Fortress of Chairs] Harvor is alert to detail, to nuance, to the way stories interpellate one another...(and) her acute sense of poetic line keeps unsettling the surge of syntax .....Along the way, she manages to pull memory and mourning and conjecture and delight into an emotionally intense fabric that never becomes sentimental.......

--Charlene Diehl-Jones, Books in Canada

Fortress of Chairs is a brave and compelling book.....(in it) Harvor displays the same remarkable insight into the human heart familiar to readers of her short stories, but here the available shields are dropped and her own life examined. (The book's) mixture of intimacy, sensuality and ruthless honesty charges the poems with an intense energy.....Fortress of Chairs is a collection I admire greatly and am grateful for.

--Glen Downie, Event

As a writer of fiction as well as poetry, [Harvor] approaches narrative with a complete assurance which allows her to manipulate narrative elements in an infinitely flexible matrix......[Her] validation of the body's pleasures is tempered, in many poems, by a rueful perspective on the youthful bravado that takes for granted the body's physical "reliability" and an implied acknowledgement of mortality. Harvor redefines sexuality for us, and the pervasive sexuality of her poetry, its multifaceted eroticism, is one of the defining features of her work. It is still rare to see this kind of openness, honesty and integrity in the depiction of the pleasures and dangers of being female.......

-- Rhea Tregebov, Sudden Miracles

If I can fault this book for anything, it is that it will no doubt attract a host of imitators deceived by the seemingly easy naturalness and directness of its narratives....Especially in the opening tour-de-force, "Afterbirth". the story flows forward and back on a wave of association, sometimes inspired by wordplay, sometimes veering into the logic of dreams....And always there are layers of metaphor that supercharge the language.....

--Colin Morton, Quarry

...with incredible craft, Harvor pulls it off, pulls everything together. In [her] imagination, the objects of memory carry within them the seeds of truth, so that the braiding of a child's hair, or a dead mouse, or a stranger's question can awaken both the past itself and the kind of self-knowledge which can only

--Sandra Nicholls, Poetry Canada Review

The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring Harvor's The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring reacquaints readers with one of the strongest literary voices to make its presence known and keenly felt in these parts of the continent. What a gift Harvor possesses. Few write as intensely precise and as gracefully spare works... --The Toronto Star
Harvor, by finding her superb, inimitable voice so early in her career as a poet, has, in a sense, arrived before she started...What makes [her] poetry so unforgettable (and this collection so spellbinding) is this overpowering, and sometimes frightening, sense of urgency. In poems like One of the Lovesick Women of History, A Breast, Our Hearts, and Always the Nights I Am Alone, there is a tremendous need to push past any easy epiphanies and reach "the truth-beyond-the-truth"..... --The Gazette (Montreal) [Reflecting on] the insidious kinds of pollution that have entered our lives, Harvor reinvigorates language, uses it to probe the meaning of memory...her vision is double-edged. She describes Heaven as an auto-free city, but she also makes the car a domestic haven, a trysting place where a man becomes "so male, so maternal", where a woman gives in to sexual abandon... --The Citizen Harvor takes chances in her writing, breathtaking ones... --Colin Morton, Arc Dart-accurate poetic observations help make her fiction powerful, and a strong sense of story makes these narrative poems alluring....There is some stunning imagery....[she writes] with a painful accuracy and eyes that see the world as ultimately redemptive. --Jay Ruzesky, The Malahat Review Harvor has a tremendous gift for coupling the most unlikely images, using them to express the kind of intricate panic and urgency evident in all of her poems... --Shannon Bramer, Off the Shelf
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Our Lady of all the Distances Harvor's alert intelligence and her eye for the significant detail make these stories accessible, yet deeply moving. --The Victoria Colonist Alive, vulnerable..... --The Canadian Forum There is nothing naive about Harvor's writing--she is both incisive and imaginative......... --The Gazette (Montreal) Harvor's stories leave the reader with the feeling that there is more to life than the surface: more feeling, more mystery." --The Ottawa Citizen   back to top   If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever ...incandescent, utterly compelling...[her stories] have the sureness and conviction of a first-rate original. --Barbara Black, The Montreal Gazette Harvor's voice--strong, clear, unpretentious--never falters, from beginning to end. --Ann Charney, The Toronto Star Eloquent and honest...[written with] a lyrical heartbreaking fairness... --Joel Yanofsky, Books in Canada [The novella] The Age of Unreason is a masterpiece... --Rosemary Sullivan, CBC State of the Arts Each story is fluent, pointed and funny. Harvor may not publish a lot, but her work is paragraph for paragraph as satisfying as any story by her peers; she can keep company with Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Laurie Colwin and the best of the New Yorker regulars, and anyone else you care to name.... --Douglas Hill, The Globe and Mail There are few writers writing today who can equal Harvor's precision of language and subtlety of observation. Above all, I admire her work for its quality of intimacy, of surrender..... --Nino Ricci back to top back home