Jeff Hardin | Generosity for a Later Generation

Generosity for a Later Generation. Poems by Jeff Hardin, selected by Ron Mohring as Number 11 in Volume 4 of our Editor’s Series.

Publication:  January 11, 2021 [100 copies]
27 pages, 5.25″ x 7.75″
ISBN 978-1-949333-71-8
$ 9.00 + $1.50 shipping

We’ve been fans of Jeff Hardin’s poetry since the days before his first chapbook, Deep in the Shallows, was published by GreenTower Press in 2002. What a thrill to publish this new collection of his work!

Jeff Hardin is the author of three chapbooks, Until That Yellow Bird Returns (Red Hydra Press, 2015), Deep in the Shallows (GreenTower Press, 2002), and The Slow Hill Out (Pudding House, 2003) as well as six collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press; Notes for a Praise Book, selected by Toi Derricotte and published by Jacar Press; Restoring the Narrative, which received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize; Small Revolution; No Other Kind of World, recipient of the X. J. Kennedy Prize, and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. His seventh book, Watermark, is forthcoming in 2022.

I Remain Unconvinced

Friends listening in may find me speaking to the void,  
a daily habit, for how else know the debt I owe for having
been alive? And such an intoxicant, a thousand windows!

I’m fond of saying these words I seek are already  
posthumous. You on your side, me on mine–but perhaps 
we’re blind and crawl toward touching some middle place.

I remain unconvinced that moonlight isn’t fragrant. 
I remain unconvinced that Dickinson’s letters weren’t  
meant for me, for now and then I certainly receive them. 

The first poet who equated blood with ink forgot that one  
is slow to dry and the other quick to spread beyond its 
boundaries. And both stain, both blossom, both redeem.

Some say we are exiles, wandering toward a place remote 
and possibly non-existent, but I say there’s a word or two  
we’ve found together, born from between us, and we are not empty.