“Lizzie Harris’s debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.” —Tracy K. Smith
“Lizzie Harris’s Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide.” —Rachel Zucker
“To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts ‘I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories.’ These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut.” - Lynn Emanuel
Lizzie Harris has lived in southern Arizona, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Her poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Phantom Limb, and VICE. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and New York University where she taught undergraduate creative writing and led a workshop for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently she resides in Brooklyn, New York and is a poetry editor for Bodega Magazine.
