Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

My next book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, has been awarded the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize by judge G.C. Waldrep, who wrote the following about the book:

A 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." Harmon seeks not so much to locate aesthetic value within this terrain of loss and longing as to implicate the reader's sentimental collusion with a landscape forever slipping away from its own inhabitants, where even the trees are "evasions." His superb eye catches the telling moments we might otherwise miss, "the lack of affect in an oversized raccoon / examining the ruin," the "abandoned / railway bridge spanning...value / and use," "the doorway another woman / ducks into to fix a flame to the end / of a cigarette like all the misunderstood pleasures / of color."

Some poems from the collection have appeared online here, here, here, here, here, and here. A chapbook of some of the poems is also forthcoming from the awesome Greying Ghost Press.