Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize. "From the first line of the first poem, this book takes us into mythical territory: mankind is walking backward, and it's back into the garden, yet this is not regressive, nor is it redemptive. A little later, an apple appears.... Seth Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, and then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, and as relevant. And he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning, for while he says a lot in this collection, it's the torque and snap of the medium, used as a material for art rather than as a vehicle for ideas, that keeps the reader on the page, becoming a part of it"—Cole Swensen.
Synopsis
In James Armstrong's pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong's poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders temporal and historical, as well as geographical while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us for a few moments anyway to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul."
About the Author
Seth Abramson is also the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009), and a contributing author to The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2008, Poetry of the Law, Lawyers and Poets, Poetry, American Poetry Review, NEW AMERICAN WRITING, Boston Review, The New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. A regular contributor to Poets and Writers, his essays on poetry, politics, and higher education have been cited online by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed, Poetry Daily, Nerve, and others. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.