My BOOKS
Pity The Poetics
An anthology of poetry and short stories.
❝In a series of half parable, half imaginatively descriptive direct disclosures, Harley Claes paints the portrait of what it might be like to have art replace the world and put the paint just where the real wounds are. "Boy Spoken For" and "Junkyard Messiah" are metaphorical decodings of society's post 9/11 post every war and shock not only to the U.S. but mainstream society anywhere have suffered and the fragmented consciousness left. This has a peerless lucidity which still gazes from the prosodic heritage of a writer like Leonora Carrington or Benjamin Peret. Exposes some things with the immediacy of a freshly opened cut.❞
John Allen
On Pity The Poetics
Love Inertia
An anthology of authentic love letters and sapphic poems, all inspired by a very real and waning affair.
❝Harley Claes’ poetry potrays a divine and tender melting of romantic ruin. In Love Inertia, she delicately confesses a deep longing for her lovers fierce purity while gently spilling her angelic sonnets into your heart. Claes swansings of her burned romance, bewitching the reader into a white vertigo, heavy and hot in its divinity, while the sanctity which exists in her voice begs us to shadow the angels.
In Love Inertia, we are cradled by Claes’ bloodied dreams- still faintly breathing within the burial grounds of her heart- shattered and resurrected. Though she depicts her core as holy in its stillness, she abandons her true nature for love and allows herself to be devoured, describing this surrender in such a way that leaves the reader haunted, heartsick and breathless.❞
Effy Winter
On Love Inertia: Letters of a Long Lost Love Affair
Venus captives:
a sapphic in hiding
The first in a series based around two twins living in a big abandoned theater as they embark on different decadent adventures soaked in aestheticism.
A Sapphic in Hiding follows one of the twins, Isadora, on a trip into the outside world as she finds romance amongst goddess cults and vintage dressing gowns.
THE HOUSE OF WONDERS
The House of Wonders is a puzzle in the form of an experimental short story. The reader must put together the story with its clues that at the end are further explained. The formatting is a visual expression of the ever-changing mind. It follows the story of a boys journey to understanding the truth.
