Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize<\/b><\/p>\n
Praise for\u00a0Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie<\/i>:<\/p>\n
[A] tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America\u2019s benighted post-industrial heartland.
\n\u2014G. C. Waldrep, author of\u00a0Disclamor<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Archicembalo<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
Joshua Harmon is the fl\u00e2neur of Poughkeepsie, and\u00a0Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie<\/i>\u00a0is what happened after the crowds dispersed, and those that were left in the basements, on the front porches, and in the aisles of convenience stores couldn\u2019t figure out anywhere else to go. Disgusted, Baudelaire wanted to be \u201canywhere out of the world.\u201d To which Harmon asks, \u201cCan we imagine another world?\u201d leaving the question dangling in the dirty air. For him, \u201cthe insufferable inching toward wreckage\u201d is proof enough that we haven\u2019t yet hit bottom, and perhaps that is all one needs to know to keep going. This is a book of particulars, of looking at (and remembering) everything, from \u201cThe quiet streets of meth \/ dispensaries closed \/ for the holiday \/ weekend\u201d to \u201cthe blood on the billboard.\u201d The brilliance is in the details.
\n\u2014John Yau, author of\u00a0Exhibits<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Borrowed Love Poems<\/i>
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\nPerhaps it will come to pass that Poughkeepsie, the small city on the Hudson, will be known as the capital of the 21st century. For Joshua Harmon, it has provided a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment, where nature twines with the present ghosts of a humanity living amid the ruins of material culture. [This] is a relentlessly affecting, brilliantly observed, beautiful and sober inventory of modernity\u2019s ragged edge.
\n\u2014Ann Lauterbach, author of\u00a0Hum<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Or to Begin Again<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
If you\u2019re not part of the problem, \/ you\u2019re part of the lengthening \/ tragedy\u201d: Joshua Harmon\u2019s gorgeous language enacts visionary social space, asks us to live, and more than that, asks us to be willing to live \u201con the outskirts of the absurd \/ attention to the material life.\u201d Here we are, with a brilliant guide who teaches us that \u201cour own kingdom goes, \/ unaccountably\u201d and that we are \u201cno one \/ but singular \/ soul\u2019s monologues \/ spit over salt.\u201d Harmon calls his vision \u201ca memoir of disintegration,\u201d but it is much more than that. It is necessary. American poetry needs this voice. American poetry needs this book.
\n\u2014Joseph Lease, author of\u00a0Broken World<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Human Rights<\/i><\/b><\/p>\nAbout the author<\/h3>\n