Multiverse

by Mike Smith

Before reading the poems in Mike Smith’s remarkable new book, the reader must take a good long look at his opening note on method. Smith means and does just what he says in this note. I’ve seen these acts of Houdini-magic unfolding over the last several years, and I’ve published a number of them in Notre Dame Review. To watch Mike Smith load himself with chains and then escape with a kind of elegant grace is astonishing. The more ambitious poems in “Anagrams of America” – the anagram of Pound’s first Canto, for example, and the whole of “Multiverse: A Bestiary” – are expressions of a weird and even troubling genius. I don’t know of anything else quite like them anywhere.

—John Matthias



Reading Mike Smith’s Multiverse is like watching Adam bring forth new creatures from the mud of language by breathing their name. Two books in one, one a bestiary of bodies, the other a personal history, both are a tour de force of the anagram: a thrilling demonstration of how the constraints of language and living produce poetry in life, as poem after poem infects one another.

—Steve Tomasula





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Mike Smith lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his young daughter and son. A graduate of UNC-Greensboro, Hollins College, and the University of Notre Dame, he has published poetry in magazines such as Free Verse, Hotel Amerika, The Iowa Review, The Notre Dame Review, and Salt. His first full-length collection, How to Make a Mummy, was published in 2008.

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2010

About the author

A native of Philippi, West Virginia, Mike Smith is a graduate of UNC-G, Hollins College, and the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of And There Was Evening and There Was Morning, a collection of essays forthcoming from WTAW Press (Santa Rosa, CA) in fall 2017. He’s published three collections of poetry, including Byron in Baghdad and Multiverse, both from BlazeVOX Books (Buffalo, NY). In addition, his translation of Goethe’s Faust: A Tragedy, was published by Shearsman Books in 2012. His most recent translation project is Contemporary Chinese Short-Short Stories, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Together with software engineer Brandon Nelson, Mike created and curates The Zombie Poetry Project. He lives in Cleveland, Mississippi.
Podcast: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/zombie-life

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every poem here is an anagram of another poem or literary work--an achievement in itself worthy of the Oulipo. But are the poems good in themselves, despite the anagramic challenge? Yes.