Mining the Quiet: Twelve Poems by Tara G. Harris

Mining the Quiet is exactly my kind of chapbook: poetry about company towns and toxic industries in little-known areas! (This is a niche interest of mine.) Harris takes the bleakness of her landscape and makes it beautiful, all the more so because she’s not trying to dress it up, she’s expressing her complicated feelings for the place she calls home.

In “tin can curve,” Harris lays bare the pain of living in a boom town:

the bog absorbs the remnants
six decades of mining
froth flotation
industrial waste seeping in
as we sleep at night
tossing
turning
determined to forge a future
where only a path can be sustained

For anyone like me, who is a child of the generation that left these places, this felt deeply familiar from the stories of my own family. Harris captures them so vividly in these poems. I found myself rereading this collection after I finished it the first time, and I’ll be revisiting it often.

Tara Harris B.A., M.A., B.Ed., lives and writes in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. She studied English Literature at Acadia University and Memorial University of Newfoundland and focused her studies on the works of Newfoundland women writers. Having grown up in small town Newfoundland, the challenges of living in isolated rural communities have always been a subject of personal interest. She is a member of Newfoundland’s Qalipu First Nation, established in 2011. Relationship to place and the role of place in shaping personal identity in Atlantic Canada are among the themes she hopes to explore through short fiction.

Publisher: Little Books Collective (September 3, 2024)
Chapbook

Alison Manley

Website

Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.