Poet in High Street Park: Prose & Poetry for Modern Salem

by J.D. Scrimgeour

ISBN: 978-0-931507-56-4
Publication date: December 15, 2025

Poet in High Street Park is a love song to Salem, Massachusetts, by a writer who has grounded himself in the everyday realities of living in the city for the past 30 years, from playgrounds to classrooms to ballfields. It is testimony that, beneath the Halloween hoo-ha and the historical tours crowding the sidewalks, people live here. Finding the university in the local, this book asks who we are and who we want to be.

J.D. Scrimgeour’s America is composed of people we might walk past, unless, like this poet, we stop and listen to what they have to tell us.

—Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws, Winner of the National Book Critics Award for biography

Time and again Scrimgeour shows himself to be a fresh and original writer of stalwart courage with very, very sharp eyes.

—Alan Feldman, author of The Golden Coin, Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for poetry

Writing organizes life. J.D. Scrimgeour lays his life out like themes on a desk . . . all the papers full and rich with wonder and thought.

—Sam Pickering, author of Letters to a Teacher

J.D. Scrimgeour, poet laureate of Salem, Massachusetts, brings us hip-deep into the unsolvables . . .. Here is where we live, Scrimgeour seems to say, this place of tug, this place of risk and potency.

--Nina MacLaughlin, New England Literary News