Blue Lash

Author's Bio:

James Armstrong is the author of Monument of a Summer Hat. His poems have appeared in Triquarterly, Gulf Coast, Orion, The Snowy Egret, the New York Times Book Review, Shade, and elsewhere. Armstrong received the PEN-New England Discovery Prize for poetry in 1996, and he has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in poetry and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in poetry. He is currently a professor of English at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota.

Quotes:

“These poems have the handcrafted precision of a wooden skiff built by a master boat builder, rugged and durable yet light, quick, and capable of covering great distances.” —Louis Jenkins, author of Sea Smoke

“The poems in Blue Lash are remarkably clear, vivid, compelling, even urgent.” —Connie Wanek, author of Hartley Field

“Standing with him on the shore of Lake Superior, he reminds us how much we long for the pure water of poetry, its blue lash that ‘looks through us because we are bottomless.’” —Richard Jones, author of The Blessing: New and Selected Poems