Scape

by Joshua Harmon

Scape , a poised and attentive debut collection by Joshua Harmon, engages with various landscapes—from the constructed and debased world of parking lots, potato chip factories, and cul-de-sac traceries to the “rural equation” of woods, fields, and “clouds’ crumpled page” to create a series of conversations and engagements with the idea of the natural. Through his precise observations, Harmon defines landscape—the word and the idea—through an insightful and meticulous relationship with language. For Harmon, landscape is never static; instead his poems map a constantly changing terrain, in which the interior is imposed on the exterior as a frame for seeing it.

Genres: Poetry

73 pages, Paperback

First published March 23, 2009

About the author

Joshua Harmon is the author of the poetry collections The Soft Path, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, and Scape; the essay collection The Annotated Mixtape; the novel Quinnehtukqut; and the short story collection History of Cold Seasons. His chapbooks include A Little Remote from Reality, The Poughkeepsiad, Cascading Failures, and Outtakes, B-Sides, & Demos, winner of the 2019 Paul Bowles Award.

Reviews

[Nicholas Trandahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The play of language and cartographic earthy imagery in Harmon’s Scape immediately put hooks in my synapses and won’t be letting go anytime soon. This is the exact sort of poet and poetry collection I’m always hunting for. It’s a truly enjoyable experience to read these lines aloud. Try it!

“Green bolts in hills' heat: nub/ and quick, windy and wracked, pulls a slip: a furl limns tips split,/ a sleaving, slift.”

“Airy swap, camlet cloak, go:/ it isn't want of finish that fetches/ fiery loft, shivering glaze in full dusk:”

The way Harmon creates such beautiful abstractions with the English language is inspiring and incredible.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harmon's Scape is largely evocative and sprawling, and so the content of the form fits the topic. This book is like walking through a forest or a desert, atmosphere is everywhere but individual lines and stanzas will stand-out like flowers or desert fauna. While there are delineations between sections and some of these were clearly written as individual poems, the entire book needs to be digested as a whole. What makes this interesting beyond atmospherics is the seeming internal dialogue about the idea of Scapes and the natural itself. Harmon often finds the more abstract and unnatural metaphors for natural conceptually: equations, warranties, prior notions and nearly Bayesian assumptions. The meticulous turns of phrase and attention to arresting details which make one re-evaluate the concepts in nature work. Scape moves from external landscapes into inscapes, so that the experience of the natural is increasingly internalized. While not without flat-points and sometimes a bit bewildering, Harmon's Scape holds toward as one of the more interesting experimental poetry books on both the experience and the concepts of the natural.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this collection to be really boring. I don't know what else I can say about that. It's the first time I've ever felt bored by poetry. Maybe I'm just not in the right mood or frame of mind or something to read it, but, yeah, didn't enjoy this, which is also the first Black Ocean title I've not liked.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

words following more, chasing

[Jamie Iredell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The language here's just lovely, stark as the book's three-toned cover. This is an atmospheric book. It generates a mood. Makes you want to get lost in the woods.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The attention to diction, to line, captivate me here, and in the more obscure moments in the book, close reading rewarded. It was frustrating, though, at times, over-jeweled.