Soft Path

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