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Matthea Harvey's work
had been published

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in numerous literary journals
and magazines, including

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Ploughshares, The New Yorker,
Grand Street, and The Paris

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Review.

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She received a BA in
English from Harvard,

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where she took workshops with
such poets as Louise Glück

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and Seamus Heaney.

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After working as an assistant
editor at Columbia University

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Press, Harvey received her
MFA from the Iowa Writers'

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Workshop.

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And she is currently
development director

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for Bomb Magazine in New York,
and poetry editor for American

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Letters & Commentary.

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She's also a faculty member
in a low-residency MFA

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program at Warren Wilson.

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Her first book of poems, Pity
the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace

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of the Human Form,
was released in 2001

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to great critical acclaim,
and her second, Sad Little

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Breathing Machine is
forthcoming from Graywolf Press

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in the spring of 2004.

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The New Yorker has called
Harvey's poems mournfully comic

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and syntactically
inventive, and Jorie Graham

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claims, "It is her
fine music which

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manifests Harvey's
seriousness right from one's

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first encounter with her voice.

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Later, it is the pairing of
profound spiritual confinement

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with a crisp, almost
at times unleashed,

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longing, which comes to
gird the music's muscularity

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and activity.

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These are poems that race
ahead at the speed of the mind,

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which I might say,
is certainly faster

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than that of the reading eye.

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The effect of her fervently
compressed narratives

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is that the reader is
left in a delicious

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tailspin of constant
vigilance, wondering,

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when did that image end?

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When did this new thought begin?

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Harvey's poems rise with
abundance-- abundance of sea

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life, and plant life,
and abundance of soul

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searching, and formal
idiosyncrasy, and in the end,

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she tells us what
she's after, saying,

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'I know now how to
kneel, that's all.

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I wasn't just another word coin.

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I would have liked an answer.'

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[APPLAUSE]