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Synopsis
In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies. The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these poems: cicadas "grind their teeth/under the blue roof of August"; a quartz pebble becomes "little knuckle/petrified egg/white as a wave-cap"; a Jet Ski "revs past the dock/like a demon out of Milton." Stripping away the layer of sentimentality that often cloaks the lake, Armstrong portrays it instead as a rebuke to human arrogance, and a reminder of the sublime indifference of wild places.
Library Journal
A PEN-New England Discovery Prize winner, Armstrong reenvisions Lake Superior ("the blue that looks through us") in a crystal necklace of condensed, unsentimental little poems. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.