A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, and above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we havenât been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves and what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramsonâs Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that weâve been ripped off and donât even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally and spiritually, with no greater sense of wonder than a Styrofoam cup. Abramson is not preaching, however: he is telling the melancholy, lonely truth.âMaurice Manning, The Common Man 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 and effect to spring us forth from one fraction of a split secondâs thought to the next. There are many and then actions in this book. What follows comes as a surprise sometimes even when it shouldnât. For instance, at one poemâs conclusion it says: An archer shoots. Thatâs what an archer does. And this is astonishing. And then it is almost heartbreaking and then one must do a double take and then there is poetry.âDara Wier In Thievery, his third and best book so far, Seth Abramson implicitly locates the source of the disaffection by which we are guided, not in the disasters of the twentieth century, which reconfirmed it, but in an unnameable and centuries-gone past. And by doing so he acknowledges that disaffection as the presence most familiar to usâindeed, its presence makes us familiar to each other: âTo be lost is to be connected / interminably.â These are grim and yet also startled poems, at home in a broken world and yet again and again and always surprised by its brokenness, and radiant with the sense that even the world in which one feels...
A few rare holdouts to the contrary, American culture is loud, unsubtle, insensitive, needy, exhausting, cheaply convenient, unreflective, and above all, distracted. What has been happening behind the scenes during all the years we havenât been paying attention? What world have we given ourselves and what have we given up in that shallow exchange? Such observations are deeply implied by the poems in Seth Abramsonâs Thievery. At the bottom of this book is the sense that weâve been ripped off and donât even know it yet. That we have allowed it has left us stunted, morally and spiritually, with no greater sense of wonder than a Styrofoam cup. Abramson is not preaching, however: he is telling the melancholy, lonely truth.âMaurice Manning, The Common Man 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 and effect to spring us forth from one fraction of a split secondâs thought to the next. There are many and then actions in this book. What follows comes as a surprise sometimes even when it shouldnât. For instance, at one poemâs conclusion it says: An archer shoots. Thatâs what an archer does. And this is astonishing. And then it is almost heartbreaking and then one must do a double take and then there is poetry.âDara Wier In Thievery, his third and best book so far, Seth Abramson implicitly locates the source of the disaffection by which we are guided, not in the disasters of the twentieth century, which reconfirmed it, but in an unnameable and centuries-gone past. And by doing so he acknowledges that disaffection as the presence most familiar to usâindeed, its presence makes us familiar to each other: âTo be lost is to be connected / interminably.â These are grim and yet also startled poems, at home in a broken world and yet again and again and always surprised by its brokenness, and radiant with the sense that even the world in which one feels...