Surgencies

(Paperback)

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Surgencies is a poem; is surge with urge; is surgery with urgency. The line and the sound emerge as emergency written on grass blade. The message is green. It is the knife fight of light barnswallow flight. It is all zig and all zag, and when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everything that flies and crawls comes in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster, and in Surgencies he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and in his failure, he marks the grand effort of trying to articulate those varied and vast connections.

Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get kicked.

Author Bio

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.