In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies.

The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas grind their teeth/under the blue roof of August ; a quartz pebble becomes little knuckle/petrified egg/white as a wave-cap ; a Jet Ski revs past the dock/like a demon out of Milton. Stripping away the layer of sentimentality that often cloaks the lake, Armstrong portrays it instead as a rebuke to human arrogance, and a reminder of the sublime indifference of wild places.