Cliff Dwellers

Winner of the 2024 Gerald Cable Book Award, Cliff Dwellers is an interweaving of political and personal poetry on state violence and militarism and their compounding effects on our lives. The collection begins with poems on the consequences of decades of war, scenes of callousness and destruction often hidden. These are poems of the outer world, you could say, but also include poems where the political seeps inward to the individual. As Cliff Dwellers unfolds, this balance slowly shifts towards more personal poems of destabilization and loss. The political realities build, then hang over poems of individual experience, the way state violence and its legacy of devastation, internationally and domestically, hangs over all of us now. --Silverfish Review Press

"Cleanly divided in two parts--one that looks out at our appalling political world, the other that looks in to contemplate the troubled mind and heart--Harry Newman's Cliff Dwellers asks, Can these things, in truth, be taken apart? For years, the masters of war, our neighbors, our friends, and our own self-interest have conspired to tell us to look away from the atrocities committed in our names all over the world--from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq to Gaza to the streets of our cities. All the time, daily, we are accompanied and haunted by the shifting and unseizable shadow of what we know and feel. Harry Newman's poems observe this human predicament with fury, grace, and love. There are no excuses in these poems, and there is no looking away." 
--Edwin Frank

"Harry Newman’s Cliff Dwellers confronts with extraordinary power the barbarous horror of permanent war, placing against it the movement, colors, sounds and love of that which is most deeply alive in us."
—Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems

Harry Newman studied Chemistry and Mathematics at MIT before deciding to focus on writing. He's the author of the chapbook, Led from a Distance (Louisiana Literature Press), a cycle of political poems on the social and moral costs of a culture of militarism and endless war. His poetry has appeared in Salmagundi, Rattle, Ecotone, Warscapes, Saranac Review and many other print and online journals. He has written several plays including The Occupation, Dry Time, The Dark, and a translation of Patrick Süskind's Der Kontrabaß (The Double Bass), which have been performed at theaters around the U.S. and in Europe. The son of a groundskeeper and a working mother, Harry grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Miami. He currently lives in Queens, New York.