Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland. Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition. "If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy," Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out "the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one...on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else "alone," where "the noise of beauty" is a cop's bullet polishing off a "traffic-struck doe," where "five dollars takes you anywhere in this town / except out of it."