Knock Knock »

Heather Hartley is Paris Editor for Tin House magazine and her poems have

appeared in many publications including Post Road, Mississippi Review, Drunken

Boat and Pool. Her writing has also appeared in The World Within: Writers Talk

Ambition, Angst, Anarchy . . . , Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast and

elsewhere. She's a co-director of the Shakespeare & Company Bookshop Literary

Festival. She lives in Paris.

Knock Knock chronicles the odd and unnerving,

the beautiful and tragicomic—the lyrical in

everyday life. Poems are inquisitive, introspective,

erotic, sharp.

Publishers Weekly

Hartley's first book is full of appetite and steeped in European culture--it will make you want to book a one-way ticket to Paris or Naples. Hartley is always attentive to sound, her poems carefully worded but not overwrought; even the table of contents reads like a poem: "The Sorceress of the Russian Sauna," "Sleeping with War and Peace." By turns sexy and wry, Hartley (the Paris editor of Tin House) reminds us that it "takes time and careful attention/ to pluck, savor and suck out / your breathtaking core," but also, in "Advice for the Hirsute," that "you can only wax your crotch so long before finally, finally / the hair creeps back like dark widow's weeds." She treats hunger as a source of humor, delighting in mistranslated menus--"filet of duck with gentle fruit sauce . . . a duet of three pairs"--but also as means of grieving, questioning, and coping: "is it bad luck to eat the salami of a dead man?" Underneath the wit of Hartley's work, there is something probing, as if she is seeking to lay the sad world bare: "I've written all over the city in these black boots." (June)