another review of Scape

The first two paragraphs from Andy Frazee's review in The Quarterly Conversation:

Joshua Harmon’s first book of poetry, Scape, comes two years after the publication of his debut novel, Quinnehtukqut (Starcherone, 2007), a difficult and often brilliant text that draws on the work of William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett in equal measure (not to mention John Ashbery and Susan Howe) to form a complex weave of narratives about a town in the wilderness of late 19th- and early 20th-century New Hampshire. In the novel, Harmon writes of “how a man’s head cannot begin to take in the places he has been, or the people, each word spoken a line somewhere in the land.” Following this notion, Quinnehtukqut not only takes up a meditation on local history and geography (or, as we are told, “a story of lost dreams and places now vanished”) but is also an investigation of narrative and language itself, and of how those two things—location and locution—relate.

If Quinnehtukqut is, like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a story about telling stories, Scape’s six sections ("Whither," "Landscape," "Inscape," "Escape," "Summer Letters," and "Summer’s Tenants") are in a similar sense poems about making poems. At the same time, these poems blend in larger concerns: the nature of the self, the possibility or impossibility of communication, the insecurities of being in the world. While Harmon does draw from Language poetry—a line from Bob Perelman forms an epigraph to the “Landscape” section—the work here balances, as does much of the finest contemporary practice, linguistic inquiry with a strong lyrical instinct, making for readings both fascinating and challenging in the best sense.