The Frozen Sea Within Us moves through forty years of work that relishes unreconciled contradictions. Drifting from visionary to poignant longing to sur-reality (bicycles falling from the sky!). I kept thinking of Mahmoud Darwish's "Extreme clarity is a mystery." This is the clear voice of an honest friend with urgent news.

A poet of the quotidian, Jonathan Harrington has the seer's gift of perceiving the extraordinary beneath the ordinary and the ordinary beneath the extraordinary. His lyrical bent is infused with a droll sense of humor and delicious irony. Most of the poems in this welcome collection are brief but sharp, snapshots that speak volumes about the larger world and that of the poet's self, and how the twain intersects in haunting, intricate, and surprising ways. There's craft and magic in Harrington's words sure to ensorcell the reader.--Luis H. Francia, author of Thorn Grass