Reviews of Monument in a Summer Hat
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"In Monument in a Summer Hat, James Armstrong's splendid first book of poems, we discover a poet of high craftsmanship, great learning, and a benign, almost classical intellect addressing himself, with a fine eloquence, to the quiet life of provincial surroundings. When I think of the character of this work, I am reminded of those Chinese governors of the T'ang, eloquent poets of fine, metaphysical minds, sent eastward into the deep interiors of wild, barbaric lands far from the gentle capital of civilization, sending their beautifully considered, mildly expressed, but profoundly sorrowful missives to this eternity that is literature. The poet James Armstrong is no less a civil governor of wild, metaphysical lands–a dutiful servant of our American eternity."

–Garrett Hongo

"Armstrong has the gift of creating figures ancient and allegorical, making of their posture and gesture–figured and disfigured–a meditation on human time. His historical intelligence and visionary power render images into emblems that bear witness to attrition, while reinstating the dignity with which so many centuries of human thought and action, even error and evil, have endowed them. These are, in every sense, memorable poems."

–Eleanor Wilner

"James Armstrong blends a haiku-like clarity with classical austerity, all the while yearning, in poem after poem, for that primal world in which fragility might have time to grow strong. His is a first book whose essential gravity is lightened by freshness and charm."

–Mary Kinzie