The Soft Path Contributor(s): Harmon, Joshua (Author) |
|
![]() |
ISBN: 1629221821 ISBN-13: 9781629221823 Publisher: University of Akron Press OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: September 2019 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Poetry | Subjects & Themes - Nature - Poetry | Subjects & Themes - Places - Sports & Recreation | Football |
Dewey: 796.332 |
LCCN: 2019034380 |
Series: Akron Poetry |
Physical Information: 0.4" H x 5.9" W x 8.8" (0.35 lbs) 92 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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." |