Word Comix: Poems - Hardcover

Smith, Charlie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393067629 ISBN 13: 9780393067620

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

Charlie Smith's "shimmering energy" (Mary Oliver) pushes against the barriers of imagination and the American language.

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 touch the deep core of our humanness.

From “Abuses in the Big Hotels”The old man they watched six years straight do nothingyetdied between shifts. He left a bloody shirt once, inTenerife,and never went back for it. “I loved,” the dictator says,“the way my mother’s body moved when she strolledalongholding herself in her arms. I have always lovedthe elegant sway, the curve like infinity’s cul de sac,the seductive and unappeasable ...” and stops talking.

About this title

About the Author

Charlie Smith is the author of eight previous poetry collections, eight novels, and a book of novellas. He has won the Aga Khan Prize, the Levinson Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, Red Roads, was chosen for the National Poetry Series and received the Great Lakes New Poets Award. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper’s, New Republic, Nation, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Three of his novels have been named New York Times Notable Books. He lives in New York City.

Review

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

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393067629
• ISBN 13: 9780393067620
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96