Meet the Author: Arden Levine and Jared Harél

Arden Levine will be reading from her upcoming collection (jacket photo not available). Her debut collection, Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021), was included in CLMP’s 2022 Reading List for Women’s History Month. Her poems and other writing have appeared in American Life in Poetry (selected by Ted Kooser), Harvard Review, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review’s Poem-of-the-Week, Poetry Society of America’s Song Cycle series, WNYC’s Radiolab, and elsewhere. Arden is a Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation Board Member, a National Book Critics Circle member, and a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. A New York City municipal employee, her daily work focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development. [www.ardenlevine.com ]

Jared Harél’s book, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, is a poetry collection that dives headlong into the terrifying, wondrous, sleep-deprived existence of being a parent in twenty-first-century America. In clear, dynamic verse that disarms then strikes, Jared Harél investigates our days through the keyhole of domesticity, personal lyrics and cultural reckonings. Whether taking a family trip to Coney Island, donating blood in a synagogue basement, or simply showing his son snowflakes on Inauguration morning, Harél guides us toward moments of intimacy and understanding, humor and grief. “I will try,” he admits, “to be better than myself, which is all/I’ve ever wanted and everything I need.” Winner of the 2022 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject is a secular prayer. Hoping against hope, Harél works to reconcile feelings of luck and loss, of living for joy while fearing the worst.