Description
Book SynopsisIn his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment.
Trade Review“Aaron Smith’s poems have always exuded a blue that’s simultaneously melancholy and bawdy.
Primer sharpens his seemingly paradoxical blend of vigor and vulnerability. These marvelous poems are confrontational not simply for readers, but for the poet/self kissing the window between light and darkness, splendor and despair. Smith writes with more provocativeness and compassion than any poet of his generation.”—Terrance Hayes; “Shame is the crux, in Smith’s austere poems; an aching, inescapable force that closes the gay boy into his own body, making sex abject, until ""there’s not enough city//to fill you up."" The world may have changed, but we can’t help but carry into the new life the ineradicable weight of the past.”—Mark Doty; “In
Primer, Aaron Smith has not only upped the ante, he’s been penetrated and eviscerated by it. These poems arouse me with their brazen, indecorous explicitness. The collection throbs with sex and the death wish, but also with wit and an exhilarative rage. This book makes me want to live bareback, to write ever-more-recklessly; it makes me not want my ""stupid, tiny life to end.""”—Diane Seuss
