Protective Immediacy

by Rod Smith

Poetry. Available again. Rod Smith is his exact height and has basically quit playing golf. This precision and narrowing of focus permit him to arrange many parts of speech in interesting patterns, kept flat within this book but ready to spring out like so many Q-tipped Slinkies as the age-old hinge flexes. Working within the post-Olsonian precept 'what does not explain is the will to explain', he destroyed the footnotes to this blurb before they were written. Too late! -- the magnet hidden in these texts has already blanked your memory and begun to teach your thumbs to oppose again --Tom Raworth. Rod Smith is the author of IN MEMORY OF MY THEORIES, THE BOY POEMS, and THE LACK (LOVE POEMS, TARGETS, FLAGS...). A postal worker for six years, he moved to Washington, DC in 1987. He is the editor of the journal AERIAL and publisher of Edge Books.

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is elastic and eeking and as anti as it is american ramshackle orchestral backflips. But extraordinarily hard to quote back so woe is you who have not read rod.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe my favorite of Smith's many great books, infused like a vodka with humor and 90-proof feeling for words, their resistance & capacity to move: "Die to the bygone or bleed/on a borrowed timecard. Geez."