SOURCE: “Permanently Barred,” in American Book Review, Vol. 17, No. 5, June-July, 1996, p. 23.

[In the following review, Latanté complains that Harrison's work is not easily found in American bookstores, but that his collections Permanently Bard and The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems “are worth seeking out.”]

Imagine for a moment a country in which a learned poet—past president of the Classics guild, no less—commands an audience for serious verse not only in the print media, in which a vigorously oppositional long poem appears in a major daily during a popular war, but also on TV, where a series of innovative hybrids pioneer a new genre, stir controversy, and provoke debate. This country, however, is not America, though we do talk a good game of poetry renaissance: “From cyber-savvy Californians to the word-slamming iconoclasts of New York's Nuyorican Poets cafe, from rappers and rockers to college professors...