Jamie Harrison is the author of six novels, including The Widow Nash (Counterpoint, 2017), the Jules Clement mystery series, and The Center of Everything (Counterpoint, 2021), from which “Polly, Looking” was adapted. She is a Ucross Foundation fellow, a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and the winner of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award. She has lived in Montana for more than thirty years.
By Jamie Harrison, Illustrations by Armando Veve
December 3, 2020 | Fiction
Polly’s problem after the accident, really one of her largest problems, was an inability to prune what she saw and what she thought, to stop her brain. She was both too easily distracted and too attentive. When she’d gotten out of the hospital, she’d gone on a looking binge. Ned brought her photography and gardening books, stacks of Sotheby’s catalogues he found at the local Goodwill store, piling them everywhere as a hedge against her glitches in language. Polly spent one unnerving afternoon flat on her back in the yard, watching trees encroach on clouds. There hadn’t been much to do but observe.
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