Blue Lash: Poems

Author/Contributor(s):	Armstrong, James
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Date:	03/13/2006
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

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.