Seth Abramson
The Suburban Ecstasies
Northerners Is Now Available!
Top 25 National Bestseller, May '11
This book will get a lot of well-deserved attention...serious & ambitious, full of torqued proverbs, Abramson's work shows a poet uncommonly interested in...hard questions, & harder answers, about how to live. -Publishers Weekly
No young poet today writes with as much empathy for the fallen, for the captive classes, for the workers high and low....America has been awaiting the arrival of a poet like Seth Abramson for a generation... -Barn Owl Review
[A] powerful voice...Northerners is a new work built on, but not indebted to, great poetic ancestry. -Notre Dame Review
Abramson's singularly adept winding of language & syntax comes together to create a striking work ....[which] unabashedly tackles nebulous concepts with an intricate & exhaustive logic....Without a doubt, Northerners is a work of sterling craft & intelligence. -iO: A Journal of New American Poetry
Abramson has given us fifty poems that reveal a keen set of observations about compassion, consciousness, & justice. -Contrary
Scrutinizes precepts & principles which form the building blocks of civilization...it is extraordinary in its insight & highly recommended. -Midwest Book Review
Northerners cements Abramson's place in the highest echelon of American poetry's up-and-comers. Seth Abramson-the-poet is an absolute force...[t]he landscape of these poems is devastatingly sparse & richly compelling...yet what makes this book so redemptive is the poet's tenderness amidst coarse realities...[t]hese are poems of technical purity & profound grace. -Bradley Harrison, Bat City Review
Abramson's intricate, absorbing, & distinctive poems wrestle not just with language--much poetry does that--but with the objects of language: the events, landscapes, & weather that surround us & determine our lives. Dream-like, yet ever-alert, this work is memorable & illuminating. -Don Share, Poetry
To reckon the currents of muscular energy in Abramson's Northerners is to recognize that poetry may be located in language's particulars & in the local but it penetrates every thought, every atom of one's daily life. -Peter Gizzi, UMass-Amherst
Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, & then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, & as relevant. & he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning... -Cole Swensen, Brown University
The Suburban Ecstasies Is Here!
[A]mbitious & demanding...[an] achievement. -Notre Dame Review
Experiencing Abramson for the first time is a mixture of bewilderment, assault & awe....[e]ach poem is a potent distillation of an experience. Each word seems essential & precious...Abramson is masterful enough to avoid seeming shallow or tedious...the superimposition of the mythical & the exotic onto the practical creates mystery & magic. -The Daily Cardinal
Filled with story-telling, but also extremely difficult in a hard flame- like gem of a way...full of myth & Menippean satire...I like this learned poetry, even when I don't understand it. Abramson's voice, both legal & illegal, furthers dynamic motion...The Suburban Ecstasies is not anti-intellectual, & because of this alone, it is in a special idiolect. -David Shapiro
Working in the vivid, revivifying borderlands of such American adventures as Paul Metcalf's Genoa & Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, The Suburban Ecstasies propounds a syllabic heroism, one in which even the gentlest, most lyric proposals set forth towards ecstasy. These pages glow with immediate mastery. -Donald Revell, UNLV
Seth's Abramson's first book is enough to make Stephen Dedalus dizzy, being somehow lyric, epic, & dramatic all at the same time. He has a fine ear & a keen eye. He has mastered a prosody that both drives his narrative--I read the book at a single setting because I couldn't stop reading once I had started--& that also rings the changes on repeating themes or motifs. It is very difficult to write a book-length poem, but Abramson makes it seem easy. He has a compelling story to tell, both fantastical & down to earth. I'd guess it's equal parts autobiography & invention. He calls it a monomyth, & it's that too. First books aren't meant to have this kind of authority. -John Matthias, University of Notre Dame
Readings (2009 through 2011)
Southeast CC, Burlington, IA
Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 10
The Mill, Iowa City, IA
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 7:30
PS1, Iowa City, IA
Friday, February 19, 2010, 7:30
Project Lodge, Madison, WI
Thursday, February 25, 2010, 6
MATC, Madison, WI
Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 8
Gates of Heaven, Madison, WI
Friday, July 9, 2010, 7:30
Arena Poetry Festival, Arena, WI
Thursday, October 21, 2010, 7:30
Rainbow Bookstore, Madison, WI
Thursday, December 9, 2010, 7
Avol's Bookstore, Madison, WI
Friday, February 25, 2011, 5
Illinois Wesleyan, Bloomington, IL
Thursday, March 3, 2011, 7
Beaverdale Books, Des Moines, IA
Monday, May 2, 2011, 1
Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
Saturday, July 30, 2011, 6
Outpost 186, Boston, MA
Sunday, October 23, 2011, 4
WI Book Festival, Madison, WI
Saturday, November 12, 2011, 7
Book Arts Center, Kalamazoo, MI
Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 7
The Cardinal Bar, Madison, WI