Join writer and artist Summer Hart for the launch of her debut poetry collection Boomhouse. 

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.

About the author:

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation. Her written and visual narratives are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. Summer is the author of Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press). She is the 2022 Hellen Ingram Plummer Fellow at MacDowell. Her poetry can be found in Bedfellows, Heavy Feather Review, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in shows and galleries including SPRING/BREAK, NYC; Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA; and The Parsonage Gallery, Searsport, ME.

Praise for Boomhouse:

“There is no other poetry book quite like Boomhouse. Summer J. Hart’s poems are at once grim and tender, brutal and yielding, as they unfold with intense lyricism: dark omens, protection spells, and prayers intermingle as Hart crafts for us a rich and relentless world in which peril lurks everywhere.”—W. Todd Kaneko, author of This Is How the Bone Sings

“Hart’s hybridic constructions brilliantly braid lyric segments with intimate narration, anchoring us in air that is “spiced in the cologne of lupines,” as she explores what it means to be an inhabitant of this earth.”—Simone Muench, author of Wolf Centos and Orange Crush

“The poems in Summer J. Hart’s Boomhouse do real, necessary, and stirring work: they observe, they witness, they cure—cure as in heal and cure as in preserve—and they curse.”—Lindsay Turner, author of The Upstate

“Summer J. Hart’s poems form an eclectic gathering so magnificently crafted that it reads as fluidly as the best novels in verse; yet this immersive collection never forsakes its sense of existence as a granular and motley affair.… In invocations as rhythmic as Joy Harjo’s, every Earthling that makes Hart’s world is marked and held with specific, particular care.”—Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of The Box

“These poems twist an archive of place from wooly & feral, burdock & clover, apples & lobsters, peat & loam, barnacles & bladder, grass & chlorine, fingers & tangles, grackles & blackbirds, plump & shiny, my sister & I, feathers & claws, saltwater & time, dried seaweed & frayed rope, high summer & low tide.”—Pattie McCarthy, author of Wifthing