Poetry. "SOMEONE ELSE'S NAME is a first book full of stunning performances, each one infused with wit, feeling, and humanity, and each one delighting in the full use of the medium and its devices. It's a happy thing to witness the emergence of such a talent."—Richard Wilbur"In this brilliant first book the deepest of feeling and the most profound thought rise up in response to a glittering surface of wit, which is never an end in itself. Throughout these poems, deep poetic learning and passionate responses to immediate experience interanimate one another. Mr. Harrison's imagination is unflagging, and can keep going through 'As If,' a splendid revisionary sonnet sequence, or the remarkable 'Mobile Bay Jubilee.' His is an outstanding talent, and he does not betray it by anything but the most meticulous of workmanship."—John Hollander"SOMEONE ELSE'S NAME is a book of brilliant wit, erudition, and technical ingenuity, and, played for the highest stakes, is no less than a quest for personal and artistic identity through poem after poem in which no reader can fail 'Underneath their curlicue and flair / [to] hear the real pathos there.' It is a stunning book."—Greg Williamson"Seven years ago the poet Greg Williamson sent me a slim manuscript by his close friend and Johns Hopkins colleague, Joe Harrison. I was very impressed by what I read, but it just didn't prepare me for the impact of this stunning and ample first collection. Harrison has all of Williamson's strengths. He is a punctilious metrist, a born rhymer, an inventor of graceful, intricate stanzas. He's also ingeniously contemporary, as in the two poems for Dante the robot, which was lowered into the caldera of Mount Erebus. In flawless terza rima, of course. Or the little ode 'Air Larry,' about the nut case who rode his helium-balloon-powered lawn chair into the jet space 16,000 feet above L.A. Yet everything he writes is invested with a deep learning, worn lightly, borne o