6/14/11

Book of the Week #24

Northerners: Poems by Seth Abramson (Kalamazoo, Michigan: New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011)

This volume of poetry by Seth Abramson, a Dartmouth graduate and former NH Public Defender, was selected as the 2010 Green Rose Prize winner.

According to Publisher's Weekly (May 16, 2011):
"This book will get a lot of well-deserved attention. A former public defender in New Hampshire and now a graduate student in Wisconsin, Abramson has picked up a very large following as a blogger and commentator, covering poetry, politics, and higher education, and generating a controversial, U.S. News–style ranking of graduate programs in writing. After all that, what's left for the poetry? Plenty: serious and ambitious, full of torqued proverbs and hard-to-follow advice, Abramson's own work shows a poet uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live: "Everyone knows what not to do/ in a dream," he warns, "and in a dream everyone has the heart/ to tell you who you are." Waking life, he implies, turns out harsher, and stranger."
Personally, "Not a Pay Lawyer" was my favorite poem in this excellent collection.

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