The title of James Harms' latest collection, After West, is both deliberately nonsensical and assertively plain: west is a direction, there is nothing after it; but west is also a concept, a symbol that means all that it ever has, and yet seems suddenly, and oddly, imprecise. As a native Californian now living in West Virginia, Harms is fascinated and frustrated by the way contemporary American culture has rechanneled and reinvented the frontier spirit, an aspect of our national identity that has clearly evolved from the literal to the metaphorical. In these poems he enacts a verbal response...

Cummins's quiet, lunatic meditations--wait, that should be luminous meditations--are great fun. From father-son stuff, and women grousing about that sentimentality, to killing someone in your basement, or turning into a locust, or imagining his wife's violent death, Cummins hasn't lost his touch. Though he does lose his hand in one of these. Maybe it should be numinous meditations? In various emergencies?

In Comet Scar, James Harms blends closely observed scenes from domestic life with meditations on music, film, politics, and society, intent on dissolving the membrane that separates the realms of culture and the quotidian.