Jared Harél
Photo Courtesy of Ilan Harél, Photographer
Jared Harél has been awarded the ‘Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize’ from American Poetry Review, as well as the ‘William Matthews Poetry Prize’ from Asheville Poetry Review. Additionally, his poems have appeared in such journals as the Bennington Review, Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, and Tin House. Harél teaches writing at Nassau Community College, plays drums, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two kids.
Press
Reviews
Interviews
Awards & Honors
2018 Julie Suk Award. Long List Finalist.
2019 Eric Hoffer Awards: Montaigne Medal. Finalist.
2019 Eric Hoffer Awards: Book Category. Finalist.
Further Reading
Select Poems
Go Because I Love You
March 2018
Go Because I Love You, the debut poetry collection by Jared Harél, is a book of arrivals and departures. It is about childhood and parenthood, desire and obligation, about who we love and how we stay. Through a series of poems which interweave the domestic and daily with the political and historical, Harél crafts a portrait of 21st-century American life that is humorous, haunting and utterly human.
Praise
Funny, heartbreaking, and downright scary—all at the same time. Don’t get cozy with this book, because here, even during the most joyful domestic moments like playing airplane with a child, death is always near: “I don’t notice the ceiling fan / until it nearly scalps her.” When you’re laughing out loud, this book will stalk you and pounce. And as Jared Harél admits: “There is nothing I can say / to make it stop.”
—Anders Carlson-Wee
Harél’s lucid poems are filled with the miracle of the domestic and daily, and backlit by a sense of how fragile any life may be in the struggle to deal with contemporary reality’s undercurrent of malice, accident, absurdity, and terror. These poems reflect a searching intelligence in the precision of each line and in fresh portrayals of how our choices cannot be unmade. I’m grateful for the hard-purchased clarity of these poems and their radiant explorations of a fully genuine life.
—Lee Upton
As with so many of us, Jared Harél is waging a battle with solitude and loss, the harm that can hide, even within love. He does so, though, with rare grace and tenderness, in poems of great imagination and beauty. I want to kiss you. Build asylum inside you brings to mind what I like best about his work—that the connections between us earn more of his singing than do the ways we spin apart.
—Bob Hicok
If you’ve strayed from poetry, Jared Harél is the writer that will bring you back.
—Téa Obreht
