The Frozen Sea Within Us: New & Selected Poems

Jonathan Harrington has published twenty books including poetry, novels, essays and translations. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he has lived in Mexico for decades. This selected collection covers forty years of his life in poetry.

I first met Jonathan Harrington at his isolated “haunted jungle mansion” the Hacienda San Antonio Xpakay, deep in the forests of Yucatan, on New Year’s Eve 2018-2019 when poet Fer de la Cruz drove us there from Merida and introduced me to Jonathan and his family. We had a delightful time, sipping rum, chatting and reading out poems as the New Year’s camp fire blazed and the jungle creatures serenaded us. (Jonathan assured us that he had cleared a large constrictor snake out of our bedroom earlier that day.) Jonathan and his family have since moved to the city of Merida, I understand.

Jonathan grew up in Florida and first came to Yucatan in 1983. He lived between there and the USA for some years. He is also an acclaimed writer of Irish-themed mystery novels and a translator of Mayan poets from Spanish and Maya into English.

Reportedly, he left NYC for good when 9/11/2001 happened, driving his VW bug south and across the Mexico border until he came to the State of Yucatan where he settled in and became engaged with that beautiful land’s thriving literary community. He returns to the USA rarely but is always warmly welcomed, as he was by Marylandbased Beltway Editions recently when he gave readings and published this collection.

This is a delightful adventure of a book, concise, fast- paced and wide-ranging. In these pages of mostly short, sharp, often humorous poems, the reader will travel to Florida and NYC, to Mexico and to a visionary Middle East, and deep into the oftensurreal imagination of one truly fascinating poet: a place where “You begin to see a god in the face of every tree”.

Buy this book, and you surely will enjoy the trip! Bon voyage!