In Blue Lash, James Armstrong explores the way a physical place can be alchemically transformed into mental geographies. The world of Lake Superior comes alive and expands outward in these haiku-like poems: cicadas grind their teeth/under the blue roof of August; a quartz pebble becomes little knuckle/petrified egg/white as a wave-cap; a Jet Ski revs past the dock/like a demon out of Milton. Stripping away the layer of sentimentality that often cloaks the lake, Armstrong portrays it instead as a rebuke to human arrogance, and a reminder of the sublime indifference of wild places.