Description
Book SynopsisA new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s
Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide.
Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes,
Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.
Trade Review“This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a less than magnetic hamlet.” – Will Alexander, Pulitzer finalist for Refractive Africa and author of The Contortionist Whispers
“you know, i am the giver/back of sound.” This bardic claim could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history’s storm. His song pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript, indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and shed light. That’s the sad note in this “gravy-to-cradle” threnody, this “lunged-up thud tender.” Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions, like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly on its wing, or on its song?” — Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne
“I can hear Abraham Smith’s voice intoning in his breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a backbeat for music that these poems conjure up.” – Charlie Parr, Smithsonian Folkways recording artist and author of Last of the Better Days Ahead
“Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read his work and thrill to hear him read it in person.” – Margo Price, Grammy nominee, Farm Aid board member, and author of Maybe We’ll Make It
Table of ContentsCONTENTS
THE INSOMNIAC SENTINEL 7
THEY PAINT 16
SHELL LIFE 22
DOUBLE VISION 29
BRAKE 4 CRANES 35
NATOMY 41
WHY DANCE 47
RIVER BLUES 56
IN TIMES OF LOVELY LOVE 68
IN KEY OF WISH RABBIT SINGS 74
HOODWINK AUBADE 80
YOUR ANCIENT
& FRANKLY BREAKING UNDERWEAR 90
WESTFIELD 95
PURPLE MOUTH LIFE 106
TOUCHSTONE BLUES 109
WHY EAT WHY KILL 121
