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Poetry. WOOD is a pop-culture meditation on parenthood and all its complexities and complications. In her third collection, Harper deftly inhabits the lives of sons and daughters, fathers and mothers—the real, the mythical, and the surrogate. Pinocchio tries to make his father proud in a tempting world of sex and vice. A young caregiver to a special needs child ponders her romantic future alongside the true meaning of Crimson & Clover. Bess Houdini, married to the world's greatest magician, conjures the children she'll never have. Mad Men's Sally Draper, daughter of a philandering genius, grows up desperately trying to both defy her father and become him. Harper accesses these imagined lives in order to get at ugly, funny, profound truths about parenthood: not being the child a parent hoped for; the horror of becoming like one's parents; the terrifying uncertainty about whether one should have children, yet also the loneliness of childlessness. The poems in WOOD are playful, surprising, tender, brave...and universal in their emotional resonance. A selection from WOOD, "The Sally Draper Poems," has been featured in Slate.
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