Northerners

"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. Abramson's work as an attorney impinges on several memorable poems: the worst/ is meeting those people you know/ you can do nothing for. American regions--the Upper Midwest, Boston, northern New England--also draw attention, and sometimes ire. Ultimately, though, Abramson's taut phrases show a personality, sometimes welcoming, and sometimes grimacing, at a tough, lovely, often inhospitable world: It is not too early for us// to turn our backs on the track, he advises, before announcing YES--// there is no secret self--/ but still/ I follow it everywhere."-- "Publishers Weekly"