821 9×12 Pages – 3 books in 1.
Deluxe edition.
COMING SOON – Out Before the NYC GonzoFest in July
“Wildly outrageous. Amazing! Wonderful! I thoroughly enjoyed it! I was astonished!” Ron Whitehead
From the FLAP Jacket copy
In the labyrinth of New York City’s Greenwich Village, Robert—a celebrated poet and critic with a genius for language—meets Paula, a brilliant young woman drawn to the light of his mind. His words can capture the meaning of any situation in a nutshell—perfectly phrased, ready to be put into an instant-classic poem or guru’s handbook. Nineteen years apart, they orbit one another in a charged field of intellect, desire, and awakening.
What begins in “hero worship” turns tense, then desperate: an emotional undertow neither can resist. Love becomes initiation, seduction, spirit, voyage.
Across the pages, their charged encounters echo the ancient song of Ulysses and Penelope—recast in a modern key. The sea is now the psyche; the oars are words; just as much at stake as the outward story is the inner voyage. Around them, Anny and Joseph weave a mirror-story of temptation and self-discovery.
Harrell’s prose dismantles boundaries between novel and meditation, myth and Manhattan. Icono-clastic and experimental, her style of writing shatters every boundary it come across. Memorable also are the clipped-word, charged scenes between Robert and Paula. The result is a journey both romantic and transcendent—a new way of telling what love be-comes when consciousness itself is dramatically evolving, sitting on the hinges of an unknown soul intent.
In a soaring surprise move, Volume III shifts to a brand-new location, the Christ State, which has been hinted at all along. Robert introduces Paula to it, initiating the reader along with her. What is the Christ State? Where is it? In Volume III, find out. Some readers report Harrell’s books are “psycho-active; that is, if they resonate with the energy, they might find it “broadcasted” to them.
With a voice “that ”—says Daniel O’Bailey, “rings like a punchy snare drum with slap-back delay in every word,” she catches and reshapes life, testifying to the peril and radiance of transformation through love.
First published in Sibiu, Romania, this series had the essential help of the publisher, author/professor and friend, Didi-Ionel Cenuser, who sat with me long hours at the computer in 1996, getting the disc ready, then the film scans. Also, Mircea Ivanescu cheered me on and Ion Mircea took over the printing of volume III.
Reviews
The Series
Beyond Homer and Ulysses and Penelope and Shakespeare and Ibsen and James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, beyond the Nouveau Roman writers Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet, beyond the anti-novel the experimental novel, beyond postmodernism, beyond chronology plot and character, beyond Freud and Jung and their disciples, beyond Kierkegaard and existentialism, beyond Christianity and all religions, beyond Einstein and modern science, beyond quantum physics, towards a new fluid turbulence, a galaxy formation, a fractal wholeness, a new literature, a new art, a new way of expressing what has never been expressed, beyond thought, towards new ways of expressing inner and outer experience, beyond phenomenology, beyond the Book of Revelation, towards the birth of a new all and everything, towards a new alpha and omega, comes a new Mary Magdalene comes Margaret A. Harrell’s LOVE IN TRANSITION, Voyage of Ulysses: Letters to Penelope, an unanticipated masterpiece.
—Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate
Biblical, esoteric, mystical, poetic, experimental, a post-postmodern novel, a summoning of voices, Margaret Harrell reminds me of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, “these fragments I have shored against my ruin,” of James Joyce, but also of the mythical romances, Tristan and Iseult, and more modern romances such as Marie and Pierre Curie: the fractal existence and true connection between individuals told in poetic moments. I’m reminded of New Testament prophets. The narrator of Love in Transition Voyage of Ulysses: Letter to Penelope is an old soul and the reader’s guide—much like Beatrice in Dante’s Paradise—taking us on the journey: physical and spiritual, of time, place, within and without. Read the novel slowly and hear it in your core. There is the wisdom of love, connection, and healing: the search for what it means to exist in our bodies and in the universe at large.
—Kent Fielding, author of River Church: Selected Poems 1990-2025
I’m still thinking about the book. Certain scenes resonate so deeply they feel stitched into my bone marrow. You can flip to any page at random and get struck with a bolt of wisdom so sharp it rewires your brain’s reward circuitry for the day, or the night. The next thing I knew, I was up all night writing music, like my mind had been fitted with a new engine and forgot how to shut off. Margaret Harrell is an unwaveringly sane writer, perhaps and probably the most sane I’ve ever read, which is funny, because her work walks straight through unreality. And yet it’s so well-rendered, it reads like memory . . . When Robert admits he keeps coming back because he cannot bear endings, it hits like a brand-new helicopter landing on a quiet lawn. Her words are heavy with feeling, and that is the echo I keep hearing—bouncing around in my brain like tennis balls.
—Daniel O ’Bailey
Love in Transition I
This marvel of a post-novel novel breaks down the barriers between poetry and prose, among the natural, the human, and the supernatural, between fact and imagination, between writer and reader, and does it painlessly, pleasurably.
—George Stade, Columbia University professor, Consultant Barnes & Noble author, Confessions of a Lady-Killer
It was not only Hemingway you went to see at the Dôme Restaurant; it was Charlie Beaudelaire, discovering the unconscious link with his poem “Le Gâteau.”
—Eugène Van Itterbeek, poet, professor, “Lucian Blaga” University, Romania
You/I sat together in pulsing Source.
—Soul Infusionist, California
From when I first again saw her, in 1983, until the present, I have watched Margaret devote her life to her project, the first part of which is printed here. Poetry and metaphysical vision, Love in Transition is the cry through Margaret’s soul to the twenty-first century. Highly recommended for its vision, fierce intelligence and great literary merit.
—Virginia Parrott Williams
Author, Surrealism, Quantum Philosophy and World War I, Coauthor, Anger Kills
Margaret Harrell’s Love in Transition I has that quality of ‘logical, integrated thought’; it is always in control of its widely diversified factual and imaginative material. I only wish that I could read it with a small class as I repeatedly did James Joyce’s UIysses.
—Harold Parker
Late decorated professor, Duke University, Author, Three Napoleonic Battles
Love in Transition III
Like a female Joyce, Margaret A. Harrell is attracted by the etymologies that can substitute for the logos; therefore, fascinated by the concavities of notions, which can substitute for the nonspaciality of the logos.
—Ion Mircea, Winner of the 2012 “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Grand Prize (for his complete works).
I should think this book is really an exceptional effort in the development not only of poetry in our century (and the next ones) but in human consciousness.
—Mircea Ivănescu, Winner of the 1998 “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Grand Prize (for his complete works)
