A collection of poems by Summer J. HartDescription
About the Book
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.
Praise for Boomhouse
“Orbiting a place and ranging in time, 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
“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. In this book, a girl can fight a bear, can commune with birds, can swim with whales, then can weave protection spells against hunger and booze and cancer. Hart writes, “I am a girl & also a ghost” and this duality is necessary for surviving the world she has fashioned in Boomhouse. What a beautiful, captivating book.” ~ Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings
“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
“Hart’s graceful poems chart the complexity of place, family, and nature through a network of startling images. Her lines are the crows that steal ribbons and leave them on our windowsills.” ~ Sandra Simonds, author of Atopia and Triptychs
“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
“an expansive sense of place that’s also tightly woven…The 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
About the Author
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. Summer’s work appeared as part of the Land Acknowledgment at the front of The 3rd Thing’s 2021 Cohort titles and we are thrilled to publish her full-length poetry collection, Boomhouse in 2023. She is also the author of the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press). Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries including Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
About Our Books as Objects
All 3rd Thing books are thoughtfully designed for people who love books…to read them, to smell them, to write in their wide margins, to tuck things in their pages. They feature recycled cover stock and French folds for holding your place. All the 2023 books will be 8″ x 5.5″…not too tall and not too small – so they’ll fit neatly together on your shelf or in a stack on your coffee table…because they are so beautiful, you will want to look at them all the time.
