Summer J. Hart
Poetry
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. The 3rd Thing will publish her full-length poetry collection, Boomhouse in 2023, and 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.
Summer J. Hart conjures the quiet rapture and violence of our connections to place and to one another across and between the borders of time, death, waking, and creature-ness.
“Both my visual and written artworks are about obsessiveness and obsession, memory, identity, and longing. I am interested in family lore—Who perished in an ice fishing hole? Who could swim with snapping turtles? Who was the greatest logger who ever lived?—as well as the passing down of knowledge: how to prepare fiddlehead ferns, the best spots for foraging gold thread, goose grass, or wild blueberries.”
The poems that appear in the 2021 3rd Thing Press books are part of an ongoing series, Auspices. They look for meaning, for auspiciousness in the flight patterns of birds, the shifting of ice on the river, the vacancies our bodies leave—concretely, an indent from kneeling; lyrically, snow drifts charting what remains.
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.
“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
If you would like to review BOOMHOUSE, please contact us at edtitors@the3rdthing [dot] press and we’ll add you to our list of Advance Review Copy recipients.
Boomhouse is distributed to booksellers and the academic market through Small Press Distribution. Available for Preorder Now. Release Date: September 12, 2023.