Word Comix: Poems

by Charlie Smith

Overview

“Smith writes with a scalding aortal brilliance that leaves the reader drunk on dream.”—New York Times Book Review

Taking as his starting point such wide-ranging subjects as comic books, politics, romantic love, geology, newspapers, totalitarianism, the natural world, the classics, Paris, Miami Beach, and war, Charlie Smith has written freshly realized poems in which compassion and tough-mindedness gesture toward wisdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393338195
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/02/2010
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Charlie Smith is the author of eight previous poetry collections, eight novels, and a book of novellas. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, among other honors. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Smith's thrilling seventh collection begins with an odd invocation of its audience: "I Speak to Fewer People," reads the opening poem's title. Smith's speaker is an all too self-aware rogue, running the gamut from romantic to misanthropic, "talking about romance or trucks." Sudden shifts-from high to low, from archaisms to slang, from swagger to sadness-render "all life a contortion pressed through a slot in time." Jagged lines move casually through politics, nature, love, loss, beauty and waste, their sneaky pathos ("taking out the trash and you/ get lonely sometimes") balanced by a cynical wit ("I got caught/ a few years ago in an internet scam, and/ spent several months/ retrieving my identity"). Smith rues a hardness that comes with experience, age or both, observing that "you keep trying to hold your meanness back," but he's never too hard to resist a punch line. Smith's velocity is captivating and occasionally unnerving: this poetry will hold your hand the whole way, though in all its swerving and speed, it pauses for moments of delicate and unexpected loveliness: "The ocean yesterday was smooth over lumps like a blanket." (Jan.)

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