Megan Harlan lived in seventeen different homes across four continents by the time she graduated from high school. She now lives in Berkeley, California. Recently Harlan's poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and Notre Dame Review. Her short stories, travel writing, and book reviews have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, Alaska Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She holds degrees in creative writing from NYU and Tufts. Mapmaking is her first book.

Books by Megan Harlan:

Other poems on the web by Megan Harlan:
"Ex Libris"

Megan Harlan's Website.

About Mapmaking:

"When I think of mapmaking in contemporary American poetry I usually see a poet setting up surveying equipment in uncharted lands somewhere between Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography and Charles Olson’s Maximus. Megan Harlan’s work has the control of Bishop, the range and risk of Olson, and aches with a strange fernweh—a German word she translates roughly as 'farsickness,' the opposite of homesickness—and 'the wayward sweep of desire.' These maps are psychological and spiritual as well as geographical, and they tend, in the words of the title poem, to find their way by 'routes chosen for what they bypass' and reveal 'where we each go missing . . . gesturing us to go further.'"
—John Matthias

"Megan Harlan’s nuanced, visionary poems explore farsickness, the sensation of missing places we’ve never been, including the imaginary realms of lotusland and limbo—recast as a motel featuring 'machines with unlimited ice.' They navigate the recombinant powers of memory and consider the mind’s ability to render time and space transparent—'the sheer elsewhere'—via cognition and dreams. 'It’s the world that moves in mysterious ways, I’ve found,' Harlan writes. And in her elegantly unsettling poems nothing is stable: firm ground is displaced by a shifting panoply of reflection, a multiverse 'casting prismatic sizzle.' A profound meditation on the permeability of past and present, nature and artifice, self and other, space and time, Mapmaking is a miracle of invention."
—Alice Fulton