Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon (review)

165 Book Notes detour” is also a letter, the letter “M” and a correspondence of letters, letters as parts and as missives. Possibilities unfold at every turn of thought and phrase. Mind: the detour into “the cast off meadowlife.” The phrase suggests the possibility of inhabiting the mind, of glimpsing its movements that are otherwise hidden, of eclipsing the mind that delimits with an awareness that moves “past the break”: “let me be let me be / let me let me be nothing.” The visitation, then, is one of pure possibility, and possibility itself, even in its abstraction, becomes feel-able as the dissolution of traditional knowing. This dissolution takes place as the feeling of the breakdown of the coordinates of identity. In this feeling, “you” disappear; “you” are reason’s nothing; “you” give “the cast off meadowlife” as a gift to dissolve “you” and “I”: “it will make you vanish,” Kuhl writes. Through the turns of Suspend, you and I become zero, “the start of the end of it all.” “O to find you there”— O for apostrophe, exclamation, letter, breath, zero, nothing. Oh, to be there, to be found. The final “Oh” is the reader’s exclamation. Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, by Joshua Harmon University of Akron Press, 2011 reviewed by Nick Ripatrazone Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, Joshua Harmon’s second book of poetry, is not quite an elegy for that city on the Hudson, but the book does catalogue an overcast place where “you can’t live here / and I can’t leave.” An amalgamation of lineated and prose-poetic forms, Harmon’s collection is an exhaustive representation of place, made unexhausting because of the poet’s crisp language and the absence of a restrictive central narrative. Although the first-person and collective pronouns appear in some poems, the work more likely originates in the wry whispers of a narrator outside the moment of these words who is fascinated enough to document “the lengthening / tragedy.” Harmon intimates Baudelaire’s collection through the title, selected epigraphs, and a focus on the worn and wet details of place. Poughkeepsie is no Paris, and not in a pejorative way: it is colorado review 166 a relatively small city with a population of roughly thirty thousand . Even the geographically closest metropolitan collection, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, feels quite different from Harmon’s work. The particular content and tone of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is formed through an offering of well-crafted details. In this Poughkeepsie we find “sleeping bags / left unrolled in crushed grass” near “the parking lot / where the windows of a rust-blossomed suv / are greased with the breath of the man passed out / inside it.” This is a town on pause, a place where cold weather is complemented by a list of possessions: “a canvas tote,” “a rabbit-fur glove,” and “a small white dog”— not to mention “pretense.” Harmon has a tendency to punctuate his litanies with swift commentary, but this isn’t a poetics of over-explanation. The sheer accumulation of moments and images does the real work. The longest section of the book, “Tableaux Poughkeepsiens,” is a collection of untitled vignettes, some lineated, some in tight squares of prose. The shift between forms is welcome from both a visual and a textual perspective: the book’s design is tight, the typeface clean, the perfect complement to the content of “ghosts [who] do not hang from the birches of Christians who carve crosses into the faces of hollowed pumpkins encoded with incomplete legends.” The juxtaposition of clean pages with sullied images is not parodic: although Harmon’s narrator reveals Poughkeepsie’s faults in generous turn, this is not a book of hate. Play outperforms pain, at least in such lines as “moths blown in from a windowsill / ’cause that’s the way thunderstorms roll / down from the hills.” The book lives somewhere between lament and laughter, a curious tone resulting from a hypersensitivity to setting. People fill this book, yet it is the memorabilia, refuse, automobiles, machines , empty lots, and concrete that tend to overwhelm this space. Sometimes the organic and inorganic crash: A parking -lot seagull blown up -river and the French fry wrapper it...