francine j. harris is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow whose first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Award. Originally from Detroit, she is also a Cave Canem fellow who lived in several cities before returning to Michigan. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and currently teaches writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

“…The poems in [play dead] provide scrappy, cunning, and inventive methods of survival.”
—Drunken Boat

“This book talks smack. This book chews with its open mouth full of the juiciest words, the most indigestible images. This book undoes me. In play dead, francine j. harris brilliantly ransacks the poet’s toolkit, assembling art from buckets of disaster and shreds of hope. Nothing she lays her mind’s eye on escapes. You, too, will be captured by her work.”
—Evie Shockley

“I mean, beautiful is part of it—woundingly, shreddingly, frighteningly beautiful. But it’s more than that. I feel like these are poems that crowbar open the sealed-up worlds of our hurt and let some light in. And that’s only part of it too. What francine j. harris does with language—diction, syntax, the line, the image—is unlike almost anything I know. I’m saying, they re-imagine and re-deploy language in an almost unspeakable way. I read these poems with my eyes and brain, I’m saying, but I read them with my heart and my gut, too. With my neck and the stuff between my vertebrae. My fingernails. I think you have to. I read these poems not knowing they were possible, I’m saying. Thinking stuff like my god. Do you know what I’m saying?”
—Ross Gay

“Whatever francine j. harris is writing about—whether her mother or Detroit, sex or addiction—I love the vitality of her language, the sense of joy and tumble inherent to her poems. Her mind has a figurative ease akin to drawing breath, a way of seeing that is unmistakably hers. She reminds me that, in trying to perceive the world anew, all poets are attempting to praise, to show us the worth of life as it is, or as it could be. This is an exciting book by a dynamic and insightful poet.”
—Bob Hicok

“[harris uses] her long lists and quick cuts to portray a young woman in flight from herself; at the same time, her figurative language can rise into confidence, showing exactly how and why ‘[s]he wants to set the house ablaze.’”
—Academy of American Poets

“harris’s visual kinesis can be so intensely acrobatic and explosive, reading her can makes me rethink just how and why for thousands of years we have linked poetry to the body.”
—Adam Fitzgerald, Lit Hub

“. . . harris risks all with a collection that’s raw and punchy as a street fight. . . . Portrayed in searing, relentless language, the world here is an edgy and dangerous place, where families are splintered, sex and violence grind against each other, and ‘nothing is safe./ any corner could be a cement truck. or a gun.‘”
—Library Journal

“. . . play dead challenges us in the way that only the most daring poetry can.”
—Michigan Radio, NPR