Jennifer Harrison – October 23 2016

Breast Cancer Awareness Month – October 2016

Jennifer is a child and youth psychiatrist specialising in the care of children with autism and their families. She runs the Neuropsychiatry Clinic and Developmental Assessment Program for youth and children at the Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, and holds Honorary Fellowships at Monash University and The University of Melbourne. Jennifer developed cancer in young adulthood, a relapsing cancer which resulted in many years of medical treatment and trauma. In some poems she writes directly about cancer, but is usually more interested in exploring associated emotional and psychological experiences and how they changed her idea of self. Jennifer’s other poetry collections are Cabramatta/Cudmirrah, Changzhuo’s Bees: and other poems, Folly & Grief, and Columbine: New and Selected Poems. Her awards for poetry include the Anne Elder Poetry Prize, the Martha Richardson Poetry Medal, and the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in Australian poetry. For the past 15 years Jennifer has joined with a group of fellow psychodynamically-interested psychiatrists and analysts to form the Melbourne Psychoanalysis and Poetry Reading Group.

Michelangelo’s Prisoners
Black Pepper Publishing, 1994; ISBN 9781875606207
Jennifer’s debut poetry collection, Michelangelo’s Prisoners, addresses contradictory aspects of her life and is divided into two sections, the first part focusing on neuroscience and medicine and the second part preoccupied with the ocean and seaside. The first section includes ‘Neuroscience’, a poem inspired by her fascination with colourful magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRIs), how colour reveals the brain and how the sciences of neurocognitive investigation and creative practice are lyrically aligned. The latter section includes poems about Cudmirrah and Sussex Inlet, places on the south coast of New South Wales where she spent all her childhood holidays.

Dear B
Black Pepper Publishing, 1998; ISBN 9781876044275
Dear B contains a number of extended sequences dealing with both her own experience of illness and her work as a psychiatrist.  “I don’t suppose it could come as a surprise that psychiatrists and psychologists are well represented amongst clinical poets. To them there is an obvious commonality between poetry and medicine: both concern the mind; our perceptions of this world …. [Jennifer’s] experience is translated into a sparse, precisely intelligent poetry. ‘Boston Poems’, a sequence from Dear B, concerns a diagnosis of breast cancer in that city.” – Tim Metcalfe