Scape

I probably should have announced this news earlier, but among the dull reasons that kept the additions to this space dismayingly low in number this fall was one reason very interesting, at least to me: the wonderful Black Ocean will be publishing my book of poems, Scape, in a few months. You can read an announcement about Black Ocean's forthcoming titles here—a list of which I'm thrilled to be a part—and see the book's cover and description here.

Here are three blurbs for the book:

In Scape, Joshua 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: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness.

—Lydia Davis



"An inspected geography" indeed. The landscapes that Joshua Harmon explores are not static or flat but alive and mobile, constantly interrupting the viewer as if to say ‘we compose this scene together, just listen!’ The reader is similarly engaged to wander in Harmon’s code-shifting, phoneme-blasting phrases that combine folksy Americana ("I’m not fixin’ to get rowdy”) with an almost Hopkins-like faith in natural sacrament (“the staid dust bunnies of belief”). Scape holds up the mirror to a nature that refuses to stand still. It is an astounding accomplishment.

—Michael Davidson



The stalk of a flower. The shaft of an insect's antenna. An architectural column. Scapes: the means to beauty, navigation, and fancy, doing all the heavy lifting without trumpets. And the escape? The landscape? And the inscape? What happens when all ancillary definitions are sounded at once? When the background becomes its opposite? This is the metaphysical, alliterative music vivifying Joshua Harmon's Scape. This is harmonious discord, which is not a paradox, but "[a] homeless cadence." Listen up: "slo-mo / pleasures shaken from troubled instruments."

—Noah Eli Gordon