"[10] In West Branch, Ellen Wehle writes "Though I’m tempted to call it an elegy, Spleen is really more a love song, immersing me in the sights and sounds and sadnesses of a place I’ve never known but feel as if I do.
[Harmon's] essays invite you into his musical obsessions through personal narrative, social criticism, and beautifully precise language, making you care about bands you’ve never heard of before.
"[15] Harmon's second volume in the Akron Series in Poetry, The Soft Path was called "intricate, intelligent, and complex," "an at times daunting though persistently rewarding collection of sound and landscape, of fragmented language and tenacious poetic cycles, of meaning-making and of diving into our political and environmental quagmires" by The Rumpus.
"[17] Poetry Northwest, in a review of the book, noted "That some anti-capitalist sentiment would accompany close attention to sets of fraught and fraying systems should not come as any surprise, and the book’s dual epigraphs—a few lines from Ed Roberson’s Atmosphere Conditions and an excerpt from Amory B. Lovins’s prepared testimony to the U.S. Senate in 1976—do plenty to announce these poems’ incoming concerns with respect to economy and ecology.
But there is a refreshing sense of possibility to The Soft Path’s treatment of this familiar set of problems, a freeness in its rendering that reminds us of the decadent fields of perception that language can open onto, even in application to our lamest of worldly conundrums.