Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie
Joshua Harmon
9781931968928
93 pages
University of Akron Press
Overview
Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is a tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland. Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy, Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one¦ on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life. Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else alone, where the noise of beauty is a cop's bullet polishing off a traffic-struck doe, where five dollars takes you anywhere in this town / except out of it.
Author Bio
Joshua Harmon is the author of Scape (poems, 2009) and Quinnehtukqut (a novel, 2007), and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. His poetry has appeared in Absent, Agni, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, The Offending Adam, Sentence, Typo, and Volt.
