Soft Path

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.'