Soft Path

The Soft Path, which takes its title from a 1970s term promoting an alternative energy future, appraises the "e;unreconciled / losses"e; of a world remade in the relentless interests of capital, a world "e;revelatory in its / diminishment."e; Written where landscape bleeds into soundscape, where ecopoetics collides with technopoetics, this book speaks from the fragmented space of machine learning to "e;memory's residue,"e; 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 "e;Cascading Failures"e; to the epic commuting roadsong of the nearly 1500-line "e;Horizontal Dropouts."e; These poems offer field notes on sites ranging from interstate off-ramps to "e;hi-vis ribbons tied to / twig tips in the woods"e;; they register tenuousness and tenacity, from an era when "e;everything [is] / post-peak."e; The Soft Path reasserts Lydia Davis's judgement that "e;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."e;