mining family torn apart by alcoholism and the moral recklessness of a war-damaged father. The novel contains two stories: that of the monstrous father and that of the son’s trying to atone for his father’s evil, and ultimately, reconciling with his family’s history. Returning to Earth (2007) revisits the characters and setting of True North (2004) 30 years later. The story has four narrators: Donald, a mixed-blood Indian, now middle-aged and dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease; Donald’s wife Cynthia, whom he rescued as a teen from the ruins of her family; Cynthia’s brother David (the central character of True North); and K, Cynthia's nephew and Donald’s soul mate. Ultimately, the extended family helps Donald end his life at the place of his choosing, and then draw on the powers of love and commitment to reconcile loss and heal wounds borne for generations. Harrison’s The English Major (2008) is a road novel about a 60-year-old former high school English teacher and farmer from Michigan, who after a divorce and the sale of his farm, heads westward on a mind-clearing road trip. Along the way, he falls into an affair with a former student, reconnects with his big-shot son in San Francisco, confers on questions of life and lust with an old doctor friend, and undertakes a project to rename all the states and their state birds. Harrison wrote two darkly comic detective novels, The Great Leader: A Faux Mystery (Grove Press, 2012) and The Big Seven (Grove Press, 2015), both focused on protagonist Detective Sunderson. The Great Leader: A Faux Mystery was positively reviewed in The New York Times, with critic Pete Dexter calling Harrison's writing "very close to magic." Poetry Publication history Inspired by his study of Pablo Neruda, Harrison completed what he called his first acceptable poems in the early 1960s. In 1965 he had several poems published in The Nation and Poetry and then, with the assistance of the poet Denise Levertov, he published his first poetry collection Plain Song (1965). Over the course of his life Harrison published his poetry in many periodicals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly, The American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Book Review. He published 17 collections of poetry (the number includes chapbooks, limited editions, and coauthored works). The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems (1998) collects over 120 of his poems. The posthumous Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems