Monument in a Summer Hat

by James Armstrong

Overview

In James Armstrong’s pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong’s poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders– temporal and historical, as well as geographical– while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us–for a few moments anyway–to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780932826787
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	05/24/2011
Series:	Inland Seas Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	53
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

SETH ABRAMSON is the 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 have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2008, Poetry of the Law, Lawyers and Poets, Poetry, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Boston Review, The New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. A regular contributor to Poets & Writers, his essays on poetry, politics, and higher education have been cited online by The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Los Angeles Times, Inside Higher Ed, Poetry Daily, Nerve, and others. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. From 2001 to 2007 he worked as a Staff Attorney for the New Hampshire Public Defender in Nashua, New Hampshire.

What People are Saying About This

Garrett Hongo

“In Monument in a Summer Hat, James Armstrong's splendid first book of poems, we discover a poet of high craftsmanship, great learning, and a benign, almost classical intellect addressing himself, with a fine eloquence, to the quiet life of provincial surroundings. When I think of the character of this work, I am reminded of those Chinese governors of the T'ang, eloquent poets of fine, metaphysical minds, sent eastward into the deep interiors of wild, barbaric lands far from the gentle capital of civilization, sending their beautifully considered, mildly expressed, but profoundly sorrowful missives to this eternity that is literature. The poet James Armstrong is no less a civil governor of wild, metaphysical lands–a dutiful servant of our American eternity.”