The Soft Path

by Joshua Harmon

The Soft Path , which takes its title from a 1970s term promoting an alternative energy future, appraises the “unreconciled / losses” of a world remade in the relentless interests of capital, a world “revelatory in its / diminishment.” Written where landscape bleeds into soundscape, where ecopoetics collides with technopoetics, this book speaks from the fragmented space of machine learning to “memory’s residue,” in a voice that recalls American predecessors Oppen, Niedecker, and Ammons. The Soft Path continues Harmon’s exploration of both the serial poem and the long poem, from the small-but-systemic breakdowns of “Cascading Failures” to the epic commuting roadsong of the nearly 1500-line “Horizontal Dropouts.” These poems offer field notes on sites ranging from interstate off-ramps to “hi-vis ribbons tied to / twig tips in the woods”; they register tenuousness and tenacity, from an era when “everything [is] / post-peak.” The Soft Path reasserts Lydia Davis’s judgement that “Harmon reaches deep into the resources of our rich English, renewing the language and creating from it a physical and emotional world completely his own.”

Genres: Poetry

92 pages, Paperback

Published September 17, 2019

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

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Soft Path (invoking the Eightfold Path of the Buddhists, as well as a softer way to approach history, self, other, and big tech) is a brilliant work poetic and psychic displacement, a molecular lament for a world populated, but not peopled, by drones, radar, satellites, and radio transmissions, all of which chafe at if not destroy the otherwise-resilient "boot-code" logic of the heart. Harmon invites us gaze upon a world where natural ecologies, linguistic propositions, and the war machine collide, beneath the cold veneer of a "semantic, insomniac sky." But between the Stevensian blanket of snow and the legions of those rendered worthless by capitalist imperatives and debt/credit cycles, there remains a "password protected" path where speakers such as Harmon's, equally beset by an "impermanent sincerity," can meet together, in a lone field of "elsewhere and otherwise," if not soar.

[J.A.]

A discerning and heady set of poetry that swings with language and cuts with significance.

Interview forthcoming at The Rumpus:

https://therumpus.net/2020/08/the-rum...

[Katrinka]

Review's up at The Book Smuggler's Den: https://booksmugglersden.com/2020/01/....