The Soft Path - Joshua Harmon - Books - University of Akron Press - 9781629221823 - September 17, 2019
In case cover and title do not match, the title is correct

The Soft Path

Joshua Harmon

Christmas presents can be returned until 31 January
Add to your iMusic wish list

The Soft Path

The Soft Path, which takes its title from a 1970s term promoting an alternative energy future, appraises the "unreconciled / losses" of a world remade in the relentless interests of capital, a world "revelatory in its / diminishment." Written where landscape bleeds into soundscape, where ecopoetics collides with technopoetics, this book speaks from the fragmented space of machine learning to "memory's residue," in a voice that recalls American predecessors Oppen, Niedecker, and Ammons. The Soft Path continues Harmon's exploration of both the serial poem and the long poem, from the small-but-systemic breakdowns of "Cascading Failures" to the epic commuting roadsong of the nearly 1500-line "Horizontal Dropouts." These poems offer field notes on sites ranging from interstate off-ramps to "hi-vis ribbons tied to / twig tips in the woods"; they register tenuousness and tenacity, from an era when "everything [is] / post-peak." The Soft Path reasserts Lydia Davis's judgement that "Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own."

Media Books     Paperback Book   (Book with soft cover and glued back)
Released September 17, 2019
ISBN13 9781629221823
Publishers University of Akron Press
Pages 92
Dimensions 150 × 224 × 10 mm   ·   158 g
Language English  

Show all

More by Joshua Harmon