the aesthete's point of view, pt. 2

Two recent reviews (and one not-so-recent review) of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie:

Donna Stonecipher, in Rain Taxi:

In Joshua Harmon’s second book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, there is an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces: the book is an enactment of Geertz’s aesthetic perspective on life as applied to the ugly—degraded, impure, deeply compromised—surfaces of Poughkeepsie, New York. Beauty, every aesthete’s object of desire, is an exhausted property in Poughkeepsie, a small American city...compromised by the assaults of 20th-century material culture’s relentless pursuit of profit in all its forms. But whereas in the 1840s Charles Baudelaire wrote Le Spleen de Paris in stripped-down prose poems that served, in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, as a tacit acknowledgment of the end of the lyric, Harmon’s spleen goes in the opposite direction; in both free-verse and prose poem forms, he uses lyric’s heightened capacity for beauty to detail Poughkeepsie’s ugliness in defiantly beautiful formulations (e.g., “a diminishment / of light scrolls upward / like a screen flickering from overload or vast / swirls of starlings, errant e-mails caught in / a bramble of downed wires”).

Djelloul Marbrook, in Chronogram's fall poetry roundup:

“Spleen” has at least five meanings in French and English, and [Joshua] Harmon explores them all, keeping Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in mind, while describing the ineffable loneliness of a hard-luck city...

Charlotte Seley, at the Vernacular Literary Blog:

[Harmon] addresses the city perhaps as no one else has in Poughkeepsie’s history. A city that suffers from failed attempts of gentrification and revitalization (“Can we imagine another world? Pity keeps it going.”), there has not yet been a solid solution nor has anyone acknowledged the morsels of obscured beauty lodged in its make-up. The solution may always have been to speak to the city itself...

And a recent review of Scape, by Ezekiel Black in iO:

The book, like the speaker who attempts to travel the drift lines, those paths of least resistance, despite the snow, walks terra incognita, and thus, Harmon is a cartographer trying to reconcile the known and unknown land, trying to answer the question “Whither are we bound?”