Overview

"Poems in Ear to the Ground remember Stratton's father and mother and draw from the lifestyle that like an album of fading snapshots backgrounds her upbringing on a Colorado cattle ranch. There, she learned to remember on a cultural level, too. Traces of things forgotten in have led her to study prehistoric language; pictures written on stone, petroglyphs and pictographs, and marks left on the surface of the earth. In the blender of language remembered and forgot, she strives to interpret the code. As Lawrence Raab writes, ""the past isn't over until we understand it""."

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"Step onto the ranch where Stratton grew up, where pick-up trucks rattle down gravel roads, coal trains wail through the night. Where a child marvels over a tiny sea shell in the sand, and a young girl rides bareback through the sage. Stratton puts into words the natural wonders and human realities of sandhill country from the dual perspective of innocent child and wise adult. Ear to the Ground is a book about discoveries and dark secrets, about remembering and forgetting. It is a book you will want to read again. -Barbara Ittner, author of Sistories and Other Tales from the Pink House Stratton's work is an ecopoetic which beautifully overlays the relationality of the terrain of the mind with the ever-changing landscape. She asks that we not just track visual transformations brought on by environmental collapse, but that we listen to what is before and behind us. That it is through this act of hearing that we may come to remember the earth sees us, perhaps even more clearly than we see ourselves. -Andrea Rexilius, author of Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012). Harriet Stratton's Ear to the Ground listens deeply through time, passage, and reclamation. Through her loving attention, we experience such magic as ""a tulip of flame,"" the velvet of a creature's breath, and larks perched like grace notes on a fence. Soaking all this in, Stratton holds ""the shaggy crawl of impending absence"" at bay just long enough for us to savor the wonder of the mundane. Family, landscape, a receding way of life-all these, at once ephemeral and eternal, are like the battered work glove Stratton discovers: its lifeline stretched beyond the wear of the glove itself. These beautiful poems absorb all the losses and turn them into solace. -Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts"

Author Information

"Harriet Stratton's work has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Windward Review and among other publications, Passager Journal. ""While Making Fence with My Father"" was featured in their Burning Bright podcast on Father's Day, 2022. Her work is anthologized in An Uncertain Age, Poems by Bold Women of a Certain Age (Ink Sisters Press, 2021) and Rumors, Secrets & Lies, Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022). The editors of Anhinga Press nominated Harriet's poem, ""Caught in Amber"" for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.This is her first chapbook.Harriet lives and writes atop a red rock butte in Perry Park, Colorado. A longtime member of Denver's Lighthouse Writer's Workshop, she graduated from the Poetry Book Project and remains a member of the Poetry Collective. Formally educated in Design and Art Education, Stratton practiced what she taught-painting, drawing and printmaking-in a 25-year teaching career.Poems in Ear to the Ground remember Stratton's father and mother and draw from the lifestyle that like an album of fading snapshots backgrounds her upbringing on a Colorado cattle ranch. There she learned to remember. Traces of what's been forgot lead her current interest in prehistory's language-pictures carved and painted on stone. Because the past beckons us toward understanding, she strives to interpret the code."

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