Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America’s benighted post-industrial heartland. Harmon’s Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. ‘If you’re not part of the problem, / you’re part of the lengthening / tragedy’, Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out ‘the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one…on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life’. Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else ‘alone’, where ‘the noise of beauty’ is a cop’s bullet polishing off a ‘traffic-struck doe’, where ‘five dollars takes you anywhere in this town/except out of it’.