The Northerners (Green Rose Prize)

Winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize "From the first line of the first poem, this book takes us into mythical territory: mankind is walking backward, and it's back into the garden, yet this is not regressive, nor is it redemptive. A little later, an apple appears . . . Seth Abramson's genius lies in the ability to condense the power of our culture's founding concepts into their particulars, and then to show how those particulars are every bit as alive today, and as relevant. And he shows it more through language's muscle than through its meaning, for while he says a lot in this collection, it's the torque and snap of the medium, used as a material for art rather than as a vehicle for ideas, that keeps the reader on the page, becoming a part of it." --Cole Swensen