These hybrid writings, staged as they are between fiction and theory, the domestic and history, abstractions and androgeny, the rational and the nonrational, the creator and her artifact, organize themselves against normative ideas while using whatever tolls of novelistic, philosophic, autobiographical, or poetic discourse present themselves to advance their tellings. Concepts such as narrative, character, and binary thinking are manipulated and scrutinized but not adhered to methodically. The writing is also a response to literature and the things of the world: it does not separate one off from the other. Marquis de Sade, rocks, Balzac, war, Lautremont, amazons, Jane Austen, news, Jan Bowles, utopias, Ludwig Wittgenstein, child's play, Saint Augustine, censorship are probable points on its strange map. in the world of this work, words themselves may become characters and instincts are regarded as if they were books. Complex ideas and simple rheetorics mingle, yielding impure theories, precarious stories, and fabulist games. —Carla Harryman, 1995, Preface
"Carla Harryman is a great wide-awake visionary–reading her is like playing Olympic ping-ping in eight dimensions! In her work we encounter the libido's fierce games: the willful sense and non-sense, the endless reversibility. Rampant story and rhetoric (our culture's self-descriptions) are raised up, then promptly guillotined for crimes against honesty. Through this florescence of creation and destruction, Harryman wages one of contemporary writing's most radical critiques." —Robert Glück
"There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn is a work of magical intelligence and wit, opening up words and ideas in ways that are both startling and moving. Carla Harryman folds out ideas revealing more meanings and connections than seem possible, yet each new image settles irrevocably inside us, no experience, either literary or personal, remains the same once you've traveled through the worlds she creates. Her newest work is an alchemical gem that sparkles." —Jewell Gomez
Carla Harryman is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. Her works include Memory Play, Animal Instincts, In the Mode of, Vice, The Middle, Property, Under the Bridge, and Percentage. She studied at UC Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University. In 1979 she co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University.

There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn

Literature & Fiction

Harryman, Carla

United States

City Lights Publishers

Animal Instincts

Short Stories & Anthologies

Sun Moon Pr

This Press

Animal Instincts: Prose and Plays

This Pr

Vice

Poetry

Potes & Poets Pr

Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt.” Harryman, a native Californian, now lives in Detroit where she teaches women’s studies, creative writing and literature at Wayne State University. She has also written a number of essays on innovative writing by women. Her most recent essay, “Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud,” is forthcoming Devouring Institutions (SDSU Press).

Baby

History & Criticism

Zephyr Press

Poetry. OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) is the newest book from prolific poet Carla Harryman. "GRNN alert just in--Joseph Cornell is doing the can-can over the delicious debris organization in Harryman's OPEN BOX. This dance of demi-characters--half half, semiquaver, three hooks quarter--places (a State) under an obligation not to maintain armed forces. Next up: removing oneself to another place; migration"--Tina Darragh. Carla Harryman's recent books include BABY and THE WORDS AFTER CARL SANDBURG'S ROOTABAGA STORIES AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, both currently available from SPD.

Open Box (Improvisations)

Belladonna Books

Cultural Writing. Essays. ADORNO'S NOISE is a collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays that "once again proves how necessary an encounter with [Harryman's] writing has become for us today" (Avital Ronell). ADORNO'S NOISE takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit. As Rob Halpern puts it: "ADORNO'S NOISE reinvents the 'essay as form,' but it doesn't stop short of reinventing thinking." Other Carla Harryman titles available from SPD include OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS), BABY, and ANIMAL INSTINCTS.

Adorno’s Noise

Essay Press

Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. What would have happened had Thelma and Louise not driven off the cliff but stayed on the road? In Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian's picaresque novella, friendship lives on to follow eros through a polymorphic landscape where their fearless, inquisitive "we" encounters "hunger in two places at once." THE WIDE ROAD was collaboratively composed by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian between 1991 and 2010. The cover art was drawn for this manuscript by the artist Nancy Blum, and this first edition is printed with two different cover designs.

The Wide Road

Hejinian, Lyn

Belladonna*

Poetry. "In this pair of wry, dark, brilliant books, we hear tell of domestic partnerships with a shifting array of W and M. Women and Men? Names multiply, genders reverse, and those initials, flipped, transform into one another. I suspect M could refer to the Market, which hovers everywhere, funneling itself through characters and settling at any opportunity into Mine. At one point the narrator declares that an artwork 'supplements being while framing the subject as a caged thing.' Characters are magic, says one narrator, because they are 'mine,' and control feels good. These speculatively anecdotal meditations on identity, agency, and artifice are witty, cagy, and provocative—Harryman at her best."—Catherine Wagner"Part memoir, part autobiography, and part paean to the late Detroit playwright and poet Ron Allen, W—/M— pits Mnemosyne against Minerva, stringing and unstringing the clothesline of childhood, the lunch lines of adolescence, and the assembly lines of southeastern Michigan. Harryman traces and retraces the line per se as nomadic consciousnesses multiplying beyond the doubles that mark, and thus engender, the self-patrolled borders of identities. At each turn Harryman burrows into the interstices between, among, the grammars that partition normative life from its estranged twin(s). Think of W—/M— as an ode to a thinking that outflanks the actual—and so, makes the actual the center from which all thinking radiates."—Tyrone Williams"Carla Harryman's W—/M— is a sociosexual swirl which surprises and deepens at every turn. It is a diptych with the aura of personal history and portraiture, but its principal gift is its capacity to conjure a world—a kind of no-place that runs asymptotically to our own. Harryman marbles her language with noirish liasons, childhood landscapes, sublunar detritus, and unruly narrative gestures. This is a driven, shrewd book full of mystery, invention, play, and pleasure.—Maggie Nelson

W-/M-

SplitLevel Texts

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Books by Harryman, Carla