The Other Lover

I've been reading Smith's book for months, and I don't stop. I have it on my desk with a few others that I keep going back to. I didn't even know I liked it the first time I read it. Smith's voice is different and gut-level right. It's not for folks who want their poetry prettified. It's for those who may want to feel something other than elegiac niceties. Something coming at you with the directness of high-velocity thought. His smarts is sharp and speedy.

1. Because of the music. (Gerald Stern says, "There is some strange, some delightful, some outrageous music here.")2. Because of the dirt. So much hydroponic poetry out there nowadays--poems subsisting proudly on nothing but water and air. Smith's poems have their roots where they should. 3. Because of the work, the politics, the pleasure, the real places & dreamed release, and all the other people outside and inside the "I."Here's a piece of a poem with a title taken from Roethke, "I'll Make a Broken Music, or I'll Die": "If the four boiled men on my block / had speech beyond the wet kiss / from the imperfect embouchure / of their lips on the bottles of the shamrock- / emblazoned Tokay, and if this / emptied oil drum fueled by jilted furniture / could be their mouth, then they could sing / of the passing into darkness / with the perfect pitch and modulation / of silence and how it feels being / what's collected in the winds / and not the song. / / Of the almost-songs we are, this / voiceless one is the loudest."4. Because these are the fierce and beautiful "almost-songs" of the other lover, the one who loves (hurt or be hurt) whatever might be left out of the voice, riding over it, sliding under it, "a shadow boxer, a small / class struggle, a mad and fearful girl, a plural." 5. Because these poems are hungry and so are you.6. Because Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman never slept here, and you won't sleep either.7. Because, come on, you're curious about what makes a book a finalist for BOTH the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.8. Because of the music.