Overview

For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Tim Earley,Surgenciesresponds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. In each line Abraham Smith includes an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow.Surgenciesis a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster. InSurgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast. Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that ""kicked skulls roll funny."" Prepare to get honey-skulled.

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9781936097647

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Reviews

Abraham Smith weaves whimsy with his words. This is a magical collection filled with lines that echo long after they're read. - Courtney Marie Andrews, American Singer-Songwriter  Reading Abraham Smith's Surgencies one is unmoored and swept away in the poetic river, serenaded by the tetradactyl calls of cranes and frogs. Brief eddies give way to a surge of words that goes on and on through memory and song. And like John Muir once said, ""We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it."" - Adrian Kien, The Caress Is a Letter of Instruction

Review quotes forthcoming from: Michael Earl Craig is an American poet and farrier living in Livingston, Montana. He was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1970. Craig is the author of six books of poetry. His work has been included in the anthologies Isn’t It Romantic, Everyman’s Library Poems About Horses, and The Best American Poetry. Courtney Marie Andrews is an American singer-songwriter originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She released her first widely distributed and breakthrough studio album, Honest Life, in 2016, with her latest album Loose Future in 2022.

Abraham Smith weaves whimsy with his words. This is a magical collection filled with lines that echo long after they're read. —Courtney Marie Andrews, American Singer-Songwriter  Reading Abraham Smith's Surgencies one is unmoored and swept away in the poetic river, serenaded by the tetradactyl calls of cranes and frogs. Brief eddies give way to a surge of words that goes on and on through memory and song. And like John Muir once said, ""We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it."" —Adrian Kien, The Caress Is a Letter of Instruction Reading Surgencies aloud produces wonderful rumblings in the chest. It makes me think of Tibetan throat singing, and the didgeridoo, and big trains in the night. The Abraham Smith effect is vocamotive. And its spell will reach you. —Michael Earl Craig, Iggy Horse Further praise for Abraham Smith: Abraham Smith's [poetry] is a compass setting toward musics caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of river. —Tyehimba Jess, Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry I’ve been unable to decide if the best way to describe [Smith] is as punk gone agrarian or if the agrarians went punk. — Juliana Spahr, Winner of the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize Part song, part guttural wail into the American rural landscape, [Smith's poetry] is a breathtaking lyric that’s as complex and heartbreaking as the country itself. — Ada Limón, finalist 2015 National Book Award-Poetry Abraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head. — Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By Truckers For over a decade, Abraham Smith has been pouring out into the night of American poetry a brilliantly made, variegated song. Smith’s jangling, brainy, tonically surprising and lyrically cornucopic work is undoubtedly influential but ultimately inimitable . . . Smith confects an entire mythic system, singing into existence a universe made of the ruins of the last one, whatever’s lying around the yard. — Johannes Goransson, The New Quarantine

Author Information

Abraham Smith hails from Ladysmith, Wisconsin. His recent poetry collections include Insomniac Sentinel (Baobab Press, 2023) and Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2022). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns on the albums It Never Ends (DBS/Don Giovanni, 2023) and Break Your Heart (Dial Back Sound, 2020). Smith lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State University.

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