D James Smith

A recipient of an NEA fellowship in poetry and an Edgar in fiction, D. James Smith’s work has appeared widely in magazines such as Blackbird, The Malahat Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, & Stand. His books include four collections of poems, Café Dissertation (Hip Pocket Press) Sounds The Living Make (S. F. Austin State Univ.) The Dead Ventriloquist, with an introduction by Dorianne Laux (Ahsahta Press) and the novel, My Brother’s Passion (Permanent Press) as well as four novels for big kids, Fast Company, (Dorling Kindersley), The Boys of San Joaquin, Probably the World’s Best Story About a Dog and the Girl Who Loved Me, and It Was September When We Ran Away the First Time (Atheneum).

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These poems are masterful in their wonder, a contemplative narrative infused with gentle lyric surprise. What resonates most here is the heart: of brother, widower, witness. Wise, revelatory, and nourishing, this poet is brave enough to sit with sorrow, skilled enough to lead us out. A true joy through and through. –Lee Herrick (Scar and Flower.)

D. James Smith is an extraordinarily compassionate writer. There’s an elegiac tone to Café Dissertation, but Smith reminds us that what is absent can be powerfully present. Such an acknowledgment is evermore necessary to us. These honest and tender poems are figures of love, not loss. This book is a gift. –Gary Short (13 Moons and 13 Horses.)

“What a gorgeous journey of a book you hold in your hands! D. James Smith’s Café Dissertation lowers us down into the difficult, sweet well of the world’s elegiac heart, where the steady rain of the quiet moments we call our lives pours down, where “the dead are still forever/ sacred in the stations of the imagination.” The San Joaquin Valley is a generational well-spring of poetry in America, and Smith’s verses add to this tradition, poem by poem. There is so much tenderness here, paired with a hard eye for the world we inhabit, filled with moments that will make you “want to go to your knees or throw your head/ back watching a jet fighter vectoring east over the desert/ on a crisp morning, afterburners pulling hard right out of your heart.” This is the real stuff here. This is a book made of tears and love and living. And as painful as it is—goddamn if it isn’t beautiful, too, and loving, from the first word to the last.” – Brian Turner (Here, Bullet.)