Books by Claire Harris

Claire Harris slices through the boundaries of poetry and prose in this powerful volume, offering a window into the experiences of friendship, love, pregnancy, and motherhood. Spanning a few days and several decades, Drawing Down a Daughter follows a woman-dreamer as she prepares to give birth to a daughter. As she waits for her husband, she talks to her child through dreams, journals, letters, and stories. These musings, both poetic and laden with story, touch on the history of slavery, exile, and expatriation and the co-existence of beauty and horror. All of this, and more, form a compelling narrative and a potent contribution to the literature of identity and consciousness.

Penelope-Marie Lancet yearns for a child. A baby would mend her life, a baby would heal her maimed relationship with the world. A false pregnancy ignites her conviction that her child has been taken away. She tells of Penelope's obsession, her tragic history, her theft of a baby, and the fragmentation of her personality. In letters to her sister Jasmine, at least six personalities write in their different voices, at first in turn and then interrupting one another. As Jasmine arrives from Trinidad and knocks at the door of Penelope's Calgary apartment, the inner dialogues become cacophony.

In five boldly inventive poems, Claire Harris probes factual accounts of incest, violence, and the atrocities of war and disease with intellect, craft, and searing emotion. She challenges her sisters of all races to confront, not just their victimhood, but their contribution to these outrages and their responsibility to end them. Dipped in Shadow will shake readers to their foundations.

Fables from the Women's Quarters won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry in 1984. A tribute to the women who create the fabric of life, Fables from the Women's Quarters contains poems that have become classics, including "Where the Sky is a Pitiful Tent," based on the harrowing testimony of Guatemalan writer Rigoberta Manchu, and "Policeman Cleared in Jaywalking Case," inspired by a racist incident on an Edmonton street.

Powerful yet serene, The Conception of Winter is about women, their friendships, loyalties and pain. But most of all it is about physical, mental and spiritual healing.