BOOMHOUSE
A collection of poems by Summer J. Hart
Winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, 2024
POETRY
ISBN: 978-1-7379258-4-2
Trade Paper
140 pages
8″ x 6″
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.
“... ‘her song is a map’; one might aptly call this Hart’s ars poetica. Its hybrid and formal virtuosity enacts a metamorphosis through the patterning and recycling of word, color, and sound repetitions, as well as narrative continuity and fragmentation. Above all, Hart’s language is a rare and continuous marvel, characterized by unpredictable leaps, beauty, and resonance.”
11 Triptychs
11 Triptychs is a limited edition, signed, hand-bound chapbook with a hand-printed cover by Sandra Simonds and Summer J. Hart. Summer responded to words, phrases, and visual impressions in Sandra’s poems: columns of rock, fire, blood mixing with water, and bodies entwined, with a series of abstract drawings in ink, salt, and breath. To echo Sandra’s three-columned form, Summer worked in batches of threes. Some pieces are quickly recognizable as triptychs while others contain objects or creature-forms with threes as either the positive or negative space. Sandra and Summer picked 11 of the drawings, and over several months, paired poem to salt / salt to poem. These pairings don’t always appear side by side in this collection but are connected by their titles, each an appropriated line from one of Sandra’s poems.