The Suburban Ecstasies
Thievery Is Now Available!
Here is a book that is truly, quietly, deeply subtle. It appears to operate along the lines of 'here is how one thing follows another'; it appears to rely on anticipated cause & effect to spring us forth from one fraction of a split second's thought to the next. There are many '& then' actions in this book. What follows comes as a surprise, sometimes even when it shouldn't. For instance, at one poem's conclusion it says: 'An archer shoots. That's what an archer does.' & this is astonishing. & then it is almost heartbreaking & then one must do a double-take & then there is poetry. --Dara Wier
A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, &, above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we haven't been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves & what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramson's Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that we've been ripped off & don't even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally & spiritually, with no greater sense of wonder than a Styrofoam cup. Abramson is not preaching, however: he is telling the melancholy, lonely truth. --Maurice Manning
In Thievery, his third & best book so far, Abramson implicitly locates the source of the disaffection by which we are guided, not in the disasters of the 20th c., which reconfirmed it, but in an unnameable & centuries-gone past. & by doing so he acknowledges that disaffection as the presence most familiar to us. Indeed, its presence makes us familiar to each other: 'To be lost is to be connected/ interminably.' These are grim & yet also startled poems, at home in a broken world & yet again & again & ever surprised by its brokenness, radiant with the sense that even the world in which one feels at home must be changed for the better. --Shane McCrae
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Contemporary Poetry Reviews on The Huffington Post (2011-2013)
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
These poems, alternately expansive & deeply personal, are of crystalline beauty & complexity....One cannot help but be moved by the primacy, the fundamental authenticity, of Abramson's language & subjects....[his] ability to identify & connote, rather than denote, the elemental aspects & desires of the human psyche is among his many strengths as a poet, & it bodes well for his continued rise as a major American voice. -Colorado Review
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 superb follow up to his previous book...Abramson displays a command of simple language that continues to grow beyond mastery....Here is the panoply of humanity, observed and reported by a compassionate and cool-eyed member of the parade. One of my two favorite books of poetry from 2011. -John-Michael Albert, The New Hampshire Center for the Book
[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 2012)
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
Friday, March 2, 2012, 5
The Weather Mark, Chicago, IL
Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 7
The Cardinal Bar, Madison, WI
Monday, May 7, 2012, 7:30
The Cardinal Bar, Madison, WI