Description
Boomhouse thrums with loss, with complicated love, with fortitude. The poems travel a chain of rivers and lakes from the great timber stands of Canada to the dying mill towns of Maine, bending and rippling through history, oral accounts, superstitious customs, family lore and memory. Summer J. Hart navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler. She weaves stories and spells from the most delicate and indelible details.
Poetry, Native American Studies.
“There is no other poetry book quite like Boomhouse. Summer J. Hart’s poems are at once grim and tender, brutal and yielding, as they unfold with intense lyricism: dark omens, protection spells, and prayers intermingle as Hart crafts for us a rich and relentless world in which peril lurks everywhere.”—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings
“Hart’s hybridic constructions brilliantly braid lyric segments with intimate narration, anchoring us in air that is “spiced in the cologne of lupines,” as she explores what it means to be an inhabitant of this earth.”—Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush
“The poems in Summer J. Hart’s Boomhouse do real, necessary, and stirring work: they observe, they witness, they cure—cure as in heal and cure as in preserve—and they curse.”—Lindsay Turner, author of The Upstate
“Summer J. Hart’s poems form an eclectic gathering so magnificently crafted that it reads as fluidly as the best novels in verse; yet this immersive collection never forsakes its sense of existence as a granular and motley affair.… In invocations as rhythmic as Joy Harjo’s, every Earthling that makes Hart’s world is marked and held with specific, particular care.”—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box
“These poems twist an archive of place from wooly & feral, burdock & clover, apples & lobsters, peat & loam, barnacles & bladder, grass & chlorine, fingers & tangles, grackles & blackbirds, plump & shiny, my sister & I, feathers & claws, saltwater & time, dried seaweed & frayed rope, high summer & low tide.”—Pattie McCarthy, author of Wifthing
Author Bio
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. She is the author of the full-length poetry collection, BOOMHOUSE (The 3rd Thing, 2023) and the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press, 2018). Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in shows and galleries including SPRING/BREAK, NYC; Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. Summer is a member of the Listuguj Mi'gmaq First Nation.
Author City: COLD SPRING, NY USA