One girl—I’ll call her S.—became my pen pal: our correspondence began with her questions about my review of Public Image Limited’s Paris au Printemps LP, and my response, including a cassette with some songs from First Issue and Second Edition. I don’t want to romanticize letter-writing, or compare it favorably to e-mail, instant-messaging, texting, Skype. Still, the forty miles between S.’s house and mine meant that the post office delivered our letters—which we soon wrote each other almost daily—only a day or two later, and that slight but significant lull granted me whatever eloquence my sixteen-year-old self could muster. I ignored my homework, rummaged kitchen cupboards, scrawled in a spiral on a scavenged paper plate, then folded the plate in half, stapled the dimpled edge, inked S.’s address onto that crescent, and pressed a 25¢ stamp on it—about what AT&T then billed for a minute’s long-distance conversation, yet another reason we wrote letters instead of, as with local friends, tying up the family phone all night in those pre-call waiting years. Or, I used a brown lunch bag as an envelope, and filled it with small handwritten notes and pictures I’d scissored from magazines. S. mailed bulging, half-sized stationery envelopes in pastel colors. She told me about her sister, her annoying neighbors, her appreciation for the music of Kitaro. I cataloged my complaints and described my hometown ramblings. She drew cartoon sketches of herself. I sent more mix-tapes. Within a few months, in the middle of a five- or six-page letter, she wrote that she loved me.

“She said she loves you but she’s never even met you?” a friend said in the cafeteria the next day, when I bragged about it. “She’s a psycho!”

I’d recently acquired my first car—a 1980 Mercury Bobcat station wagon, paneled in fake wood and adorned with three bumper stickers I’d unpeeled on the back window: the PiL logo, the radio pulses of the neutron star from the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures LP, and Newbury Comics’ grinning idiot—and driving to S.’s house meant making my first solo trip on the Interstate. Bridge and overpass construction funneled the Mass Pike traffic into single lanes, and I sped through narrow corridors of Jersey barriers, chucked change into the basket at the Newton tolls, then took Route 128 to Route 2.

S. and I didn’t call it a date: only parents used that word. But my hormonally-electrified fantasies about our meeting were mostly the obvious ones. “Is she cute?” I’d asked Ben: it seemed information as crucial as the bits of our lives S. and I’d confessed to each other all that spring. Her family’s house was a huge, shingled Victorian on a shady street that wound up a hill: my paper plates and postcards had gone here? I angled the tires against the curb, pulled up the parking brake, checked my mirrors one final time, and got out. S. already stood on the porch. “Hi,” she called, looking at me and then away. I probably did the same. Was she cute? She wasn’t not cute.

We walked through her neighborhood, looking at root-tilted squares of sidewalk and each other’s scuffed sneakers, asking awkward questions and mumbling answers. Breezes swung new leaves, and ragged shadows shifted over the pavement: had I been walking alone, I would’ve mentioned it in a letter to her, omitting the guy pushing his lawnmower who seemed to stare at us as we passed. Then her mom gave us a ride to the Alewife T station and we took the train to Harvard Square.

A sunny, pollen-scented Saturday in May: even we were roused by the Square’s finals-week energy to look at each other over sandwiches in a tiny café. S. slid vintage dresses along a rack at Oona’s, but didn’t buy any. We walked up the ramp at The Garage, wandered through displays of leather jackets, suede creepers, and Doc Martens at Allston Beat, and ended up at Newbury Comics. It’s tough to talk when you’re looking through so much vinyl, and impossible to make eye contact: I hunched over an imports bin. S. wandered away, maybe to the Kitaro section. I left the store with four or five new records, among them Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

The Red Line rattled us back to Alewife. There was no goodbye kiss, no damp hand shyly held. I have no idea whether my actual presence disappointed her, too. After that day our correspondence continued, for a little while, and we politely lied to each other about our meeting, but, in the absence of any sustaining fantasies, what else was there to say? S. and her family toured the northeast looking at colleges that summer, and she described these campus visits to me. I went door-to-door for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, asking people for money and signatures to stop a planned solid-waste incinerator, but I didn’t want to write about that experience to anyone. I got off work at ten each night, then hung out with friends at a late-night diner, or, if no one was around, listened to records. I already knew the Joy Division song, but now that I owned the single, it helped frame my summer: “And we’re changing our ways / Taking different roads.” I always preferred the B-side’s tauter version of the song, without the guitar flourishes, which meant I listened to “These Days” a lot, too: “We’ll drift through it all / It’s the modern age.” Like countless others before me, I both yearned for and cursed the affliction of modernity, and brooded over my mediated, irreconcilable, incomprehensible selves (incomprehensible to me, at least: my first day at MASSPIRG, a slightly elder co-worker took one look at me and said “I bet you like Echo and the Bunnymen and the Jam”). Ian Curtis may have been singing about his failing marriage and the affair he’d been pursuing, but that didn’t mean his lyrics couldn’t dramatize my own teenaged disquiet about “touching from a distance, further all the time.”

Sketch Fifty-three’s final number, published that fall, included—among illegally-reproduced copies of Kevin Cummins’s photographs of Joy Division looking serious among the concrete structures of Manchester, and Ben’s and my photographs of ourselves looking serious among the concrete structures of our own post-industrial hometown—a poem by my new girlfriend. I’d met her over the summer: she stood outside a liquor store, cursing and shouting at the clerk that had refused her fake ID, and then she noticed—I swear—the Unknown Pleasures sticker on my car. In a last record review, in an act of unwitting self-awareness, I claimed that Joy Division’s 1979 single “Transmission” was a song “dealing with alienation, hypocrisy, and confusion.” I can’t remember if I ever mailed S. a copy of the issue.

Related Posts:

• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: BOB DYLAN’S BLONDE ON BLONDE
• Albums of Our Lives: Songs: Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co.
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: RUN DMC’S RAISING HELL
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: NEKO CASE’S MIDDLE CYCLONE
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: PETER GABRIEL’S SO

“If you’re not part of the problem, / you’re part of the lengthening / tragedy.” So opens Joshua Harmon’s second book of poetry, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, winner of the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize. Part love song, part ethnography, part cry for help, this book places its readers at the center of a small city in the Hudson Valley where “autistic rain stutters” and “father and son / rebuild… the house they / crowbarred for kindling last year.” Survival here is an ongoing failure, and what glamour there is stems from calamity, as when “creosote ignites in the chimney” and residents “gather… in the street under the splendor of fire-truck lights.” Ripe with the poverty of a “garage-sale / economy,” Spleen is an intimate tour of one man’s relationship with a city where he’d rather not live.

If this sounds oppressive, that’s because it is. The affection Joshua Harmon has for Poughkeepsie is the kind one might have for an alcoholic uncle or an abusive neighbor who occasionally tells good stories. The only love here is tough, the product of circumstance rather than choice. “I lived in one place,” Harmon writes, “and then I lived / in another until I came / to Poughkeepsie.” But such fatalism doesn’t deprive this book of tremendous beauty. Despair is projected onto the landscape in a stark combination of abstract and concrete detail. In one poem, “fugitive self-interest” and “reheated coffee” find themselves side by side. In another, Harmon imagines “rebuilding the city / from a hatchback filled / with day-old loaves and all / the appropriate resentments.”

Like a gawker at a traffic accident, Harmon is spellbound by daily horrors, and it’s in the meticulous accumulation of visual detail that a relentless topography emerges. His poem “Poughkeepsiad” is a six-page inventory of depravity where “a girl hid[es] under her bed for hours / thinks it’s going to end / but it never ends.” Relief, or the specter of relief, finally comes from the extraordinarily mundane: “In the T.J. Maxx plaza there is a new tenant, / and in the sunlit parking lot the brilliant / windshields of cars whelm / the occupants of a Honda.” In a city where “five / dollars takes you anywhere… / except out of it,” even the smallest reprieve seems a blessing.

This harsh, post-industrial landscape is mitigated by gorgeous lyricism. Using a combination of prose poems and harshly enjambed verse, Harmon creates hypnotic rhythms and occasionally lapses into delightful sound play: “in lawful ground, last / leaf-lace, light of flat / screen.” The tension produced is tremendous. Harmon’s images paint Poughkeepsie as a sort of measured hell, while his lyricism betrays begrudged tenderness, an unwanted nostalgia.

The only complaint I had while reading was the unwavering hopelessness that characterizes the first half of the collection. “Can new tedium distract one / from tedium that already exists,” Harmon asks a third of the way in. This emotional standstill seems to come not from Harmon himself but from the claustrophobia of his hometown. “Can we just get rid of Poughkeepsie little by little?” he asks. Whether his despair colors the landscape gray, or the surrounding wasteland produces his depression is unclear. Either way, what I first interpreted as a failure to progress, came to feel like an honest portrayal of a city where winter extends into April and “memory is made of brick and concrete.”

Like Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, the collection to which Harmon owes his title, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is not without comedy. Towards the end of the 48-page section, “Tableux Poughkeepsiens,” structured loosely around the passing seasons, winter ends and he exclaims, “O springtime foliage! …Where else might we find the most beautifully tuned car alarm?” Such wry juxtaposition of pastoral tropes and urban decay occur frequently. Eroticism is subverted in this assurance: “The man with a hand in your drawers in only checking for mice.” And nature rolls in like a sarcastic teenager when “The wind still says ‘As if….’”

Harmon’s melancholy portrait of Poughkeepsie is starkly beautiful, a masterpiece in which landscape functions as an extension of the narration’s despair. Exploring the darker aspects of the American landscape and the American psyche, Harmon engages a full arsenal of poetic craft. And while he’s firing bullets, “shoot[ing] everything you want to / remember,” he still employs tenderness. “Poor little Poughkeepsie, / alone without delusions, / as if two blocks of wood / were knocked together.”

Related Posts:

• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• Easy Math by Lauren Shapiro
• Collected Poems by Joseph Ceravolo