The Northerners

by Seth Abramson

Winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize

"From the first line of the first poem, this book takes us into mythical mankind is walking backward, and it's back into the garden, yet this is not regressive, nor is it redemptive. A little later, an apple appears . . . Seth Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, and then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, and as relevant. And he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning, for while he says a lot in this collection, it's the torque and snap of the medium, used as a material for art rather than as a vehicle for ideas, that keeps the reader on the page, becoming a part of it." -- Cole Swensen

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published April 18, 2011

About the author

Seth Abramson is author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009) and a contributing author to The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). In 2008 he was awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize by Poetry. His poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2008, Poetry, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poets & Writers, and New American Writing. A graduate of Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is currently a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews

[Mark Schultz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Northerners, by Seth Abramson, 2011. I worked hard on this book, but came up with little. Some good phrases, insights. But mostly, the poems seemed more like riddles – and the point of the book was to figure out these riddles. There was good language here in these poems, good structure, too. And some insight. But so completely self-referential as to be nearly inscrutable. Expression is clearly one of Abramson’s goals, but communication is lacking.
Here’s something I liked, from the poem “A Useful Man”:

briefly alone,
in fact, in the center of that place he always finds himself by instinct,
he sees there is only the light and the wilderness
and only one day
for travel.

[Colorado Review]

Reviewed here for Colorado Review by Eric Weinstein.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Finding your form is not a form of discipline."