Edward Harkness, to his everlasting regret, did not see Elvis when the King of Rock 'n' Roll visited Seattle during the World's Fair in 1962. Other than that, Harkness is a happy husband to Linda, father to Ned and Devin, and grandfather to Clio and Hilde. Having retired after a 30+ year career as a writing teacher at Shoreline Community College, he now devotes his time to other pleasures: gardening, cycling, visiting the kids and, now and then, making poems. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary and Beautiful Passing Lives, both from Pleasure Boat Studio. His most recent chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. Two poems in this collection, "Tying a Tie" and "Airborne," won the Terrain.org annual poetry prize for 2017. He lives in Shoreline, Washington, about a mile from the north Seattle home where he grew up, and where his mother, Doris Harkness, whose art works grace the covers of this book, still lives.

Books by Edward Harkness:

Other poems on the web by Edward Harkness:
Two poems
Two poems
"Neighborhood Crows"
A Note to My Sons

About The Law of the Unforeseen:

"In The Law of the Unforeseen, the law Harkness speaks of requires us to know now and then. We walk under 'the trees of unremembrance,' so that we may know who we are, how we got here, and who we came from. And we arrive in this lovely and threatened paradise called Earth, right now. The 'endless replication of clam shells, ants, / hyacinths in spring"?--it's true, we will lose those things, individually, but these poems savor such stuff, and in that savoring they give us hope for the future."
—thlaofthun

"Ed Harkness's great gift is for the lyric telling of 'the heart's winding chronicle.' Permeated with the keenly felt ache of life, 'the world breaking your heart and, somehow, mending it,' these poems celebrate the sensuous beauty of 'this gold world' in deep music line by line. Harkness's poems are a necessary sustenance for our present perilous moment."
—Alicia Hokanson

"Ed Harkness' poems are always raising themselves up, always lifting off the ordinary. They are persistent, observant, sharply etched, hovering in the vicinity like mist off the woods and waters, invisibly stirring the clear air, offering unlikely gifts we might suffer from the lack of otherwise.'
—Paul Hunter

"Suffused with tenderness for the earth and its fragile creatures, The Law of the Unforeseen contains poems--lyrical, sensual, often comic, sometimes savagely funny--that ride a current of melancholy, a certainty of loss which deepens the vitality Harkness brings to the page. This is a rich, generous-hearted collection, a moving testament by a man of passionate conscience."
—Anne Pitkin

"In The Law of the Unforeseen, Edward Harkness confronts the living world as urgently as the world of ugly vase, thrift-store spoon, broken, half-buried beach shell, and the 'floral design of pond ice.' The embrace of this important collection is truly Whitmanesque. I deeply admire how it keeps breaking me even as it pulls me toward its heart where every bloodied instant lives alongside some unlikely bit of mending."
—Derek Sheffield