Scape

“In Scape, Joshua 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: his incisive and richly musical stanzas have an ever-returning vigor and freshness.” —Lydia Davis
“Scape—suggesting inscape, escape, landscape—and not unrelated to escapade. Donne used the word to indicate evasion; Milton, to imply error. Which brings us to the errant, to the wandering that seeks to free. In Harmon’s care, scape engenders an errant vocabulary that accrues meaning by liberating it, nurturing ambiguities and encouraging multi-valence, and all with a stunning command of sound that makes every line crystalline. A brilliant, thirst-quenching book.” —Cole Swensen
“The landscapes that Joshua Harmon explores are not static or flat but alive and mobile, constantly interrupting the viewer as if to say ‘we compose this scene together, just listen!’ The reader is similarly engaged to wander in Harmon’s code-shifting, phoneme-blasting phrases that combine folksy Americana with an almost Hopkins-like faith in natural sacrament. Scape holds up the mirror to a nature that refuses to stand still. It is an astounding accomplishment.” —Michael Davidson
“The stalk of a flower. The shaft of an insect’s antenna. An architectural column. Scapes: the means to beauty, navigation, and fancy, doing all the heavy lifting without trumpets. And the escape? The landscape? And the inscape? What happens when all ancillary definitions are sounded at once? When the background becomes its opposite? This is the metaphysical, alliterative music vivifying Joshua Harmon’s Scape. This is harmonious discord, which is not a paradox, but ‘[a] homeless cadence.’ Listen up: ‘slo-mo / pleasures shaken from troubled instruments.’” —Noah Eli Gordon