Thievery
Seth Abramson
9781937378691
64 pages
University of Akron Press
Overview
Here is a book that is truly quietly deeply subtle. It appears to operate along the lines of here is how one thing follows another; it appears to rely on anticipated cause and effect to spring us forth from one fraction of a split second’s thought to the next. There are many and then actions in this book. What follows comes as a surprise sometimes even when it shouldn't. For instance, at one poem’s conclusion it says: An archer shoots. That’s what an archer does. And this is astonishing. And then it is almost heartbreaking and then one must do a double take and then there is poetry. —Dara Wier A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, and above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we haven’t been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves and what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramson’s Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that we’ve been ripped off and don’t even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally and spiritually, with no greater sense of wonder than a Styrofoam cup. Abramson is not preaching, however: he is telling the melancholy, lonely truth.—Maurice Manning
Author Bio
A graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Seth Abramson is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Northerners (Western Michigan University Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Poetry & Prose, and The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009). Presently a doctoral candidate (ABD) in English Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Series Co-Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2014), and a contemporary poetry reviewer for The Huffington Post, he has published work in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press, 2008), Poetry of the Law (University of Iowa Press, 2010), AGNI, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and Poetry. In 2008, he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize by Poetry.
