Morgan's collection is a powerful exploration of realities that characterized the development of the shipping industry in the Great Lakes region and the lives of those who gave up safe harbor to sail the Lakes. She skillfully captures the longing, loss, and drive to understand not just the facts of historic shipwrecks, but what those wrecks can also tell us about the people who sailed them to both profitable and tragic destinations.
~Inland Seas
With each poem, she deep dives into another Great Lakes shipwreck. Most are real, a few imaginary, but each is seen from a unique perspective.
~Zinta Aistars
This book is exactly the collection to appeal to experienced readers of poetry as well as readers who believe they don’t like poetry. Its content is compelling and its characters are sympathetic, as in the best fiction, yet its craft is both skillful and subtle. Reading and rereading this book has been exceptionally satisfying.
~Lynn Domina
Here, a shipload of cast iron stoves slips to the bottom of the lake, where it will rest forever among the teacups, the crankshafts, the revolvers, and the bones of sailors. On one level, Cindy Hunter Morgan’s Harborless is a deft and moving chronicle of forty shipping catastrophes in the Great Lakes, described with loving attention to detail, to the tiny particulars that create our sense of a whole story. But on a greater level, this is also a book about the transience of human experience, the vagaries of memory, and the forces that buffet all of us, often wildly and violently, during and after our lives. Harborless is a brilliant first book, one that will continue to haunt me.
~Kevin Prufer
For those of us who have lived most of our lives within a heavy wind's blow of the Great Lakes, there can exist in our hearts a vicarious connection to the men and women who have plied those expanses of ice water over the centuries. We watch the waves bow themselves like mendicants upon Lake Michigan's beaches, begging Chicago to notice, or watch the sprays toss themselves on Lake Superior's cliffs as if they could claw their way to the summits, and we feel something in our hearts crash quietly in response, tugging our bodies back to the warmth of the hearth even as our minds are tugged across the waters like desperate barges. Cindy Hunter Morgan has felt that same tug, and responded with the poems of Harborless.
~David Nilsen
Art and history, geography and prosody, folklore, flotsam, salvage and ruin: Harborless is freighted with scholarship, imaginative heft, and virtuosity. For the stargazer, horizon scanner, boatman and long-hauler, storm watcher and lighthouse keeper, Cindy Hunter Morgan has wrought a Great Lakes classic: an epic paid out in local, heroic, and poignant doses. Brava!
~Thomas Lynch
The heart of Harborless lies in the imaginative poetry. Just like the wrecks, no two poems are alike.
~Kate Habrel
In Cindy Hunter Morgan's elegant collection, Harborless, the unique power of historic poetry is on full display. These meticulous and striking poems balance imagination and fact to explore the complex maritime narratives of the Great Lakes. The result is an important and refreshing book full of unexpected histories and wonder.
~Adrian Matejka, Author of the Big Smoke
