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Appetite
Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and, sometimes, heartbreaking.
Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. These poems announce their presence with a style that is as beautifully wrought as it is provocative.
In the America of Appetite, the usual hierarchies are obliterated: the disposable is as valuable as the traditional, pop culture is on the same level as the sacred, and the pleasurable simultaneity of past and present are found in high art and the tabloid. Smith’s work engages our contemporary moment and how we want to think of ourselves, while nodding to rich poetic, cultural, and personal histories.
Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. These poems announce their presence with a style that is as beautifully wrought as it is provocative.
In the America of Appetite, the usual hierarchies are obliterated: the disposable is as valuable as the traditional, pop culture is on the same level as the sacred, and the pleasurable simultaneity of past and present are found in high art and the tabloid. Smith’s work engages our contemporary moment and how we want to think of ourselves, while nodding to rich poetic, cultural, and personal histories.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 2, 2012
2 people are currently reading
152 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Smith
6 books18 followersAaron Smith is the author of five books of poetry published by the Pitt Poetry Series. His collections include Blue on Blue Ground (2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; Appetite (2012), an NPR Great Read and finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; Primer (2016), a Poetry Must Read for the Massachusetts Center for the Book; The Book of Daniel (2019); and Stop Lying (2023). His chapbooks include Men in Groups and What’s Required, winner of the Frank O’Hara Award. A three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, he is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mass Cultural Council, and his work has appeared in such publications as Court Green, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry 2013. He has taught at West Virginia Wesleyan and is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 20, 2025
The writing is good, the voice and tone clearly convey intent and personality. Though, I felt through the whole collection that it was not for me and that making someone like me feel like outsider was intentional on the author's part.
January 12, 2014
...the lyric poet’s images are nothing but the poet himself, and only different objectifications of himself, which is why, as the moving centre of that world, he is able to say "I": this self is not that of the waking, empirically real man, however, but rather the sole, truly existing and eternal self that dwells at the base of being, through whose depictions the lyric genius sees right through to the very basis of being.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy" –
Honesty, little slut, must you insist
On hearing every dirty word I know
And all my worst affairs? Are impotence,
Insanity, and lying what you lust for?
Your hands are cold, feeling me in the dark.
—Edgar Bowers, “To the Contemporary Muse”
In his essay, “The Very Art of Telling: Sharon Olds and Writing Narrative Poetry,” Aaron Smith attempts to come to terms with his own sexuality within a nation filled with mixed messages: “As a gay person, I don’t believe I have the luxury of removing "me" from my poems. And, frankly, I’m tired of worrying about being relegated to the margins of contemporary poetry for writing about the body, for writing with emotion, or for using the narrative "I." Recently I saw a news article about a politician in Alabama who is introducing a bill to the legislature with the hopes of removing all public funding from libraries and universities that have books with gay or bisexual characters in them or that promote homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. My first thought was: This is absurd. Just because we aren’t talked about doesn’t mean that we don’t exist. Then it occurred to me: If we aren’t talked about, do we really exist?”
Aaron Smith is a poet who grew up in Appalachia and later moved to New York City. (Risking the confessional to interject that this is something that “I” have also done.) Smith, also like “myself,” grew up reading the confessional poets of the mid-twentieth century: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell among others. Confessional poetry was an attempt to articulate, in an open and direct way, feelings that had previously gone unsaid in American poetry. Confessional poets spoke of divorce, alcoholism, mental illness. They spoke of abortions and miscarriages and cancer.
Aaron Smith’s latest poetry collection, Appetite, (2012, University of Pittsburgh Press) is all about being gay. They are poems which range from despair to humor-- all of it grounded in an awareness of gayness. Growing up in an evangelical household in West Virginia, Smith felt, from an early age, the effect of being an outsider in a culture that finds a doctrinal delight in hateful rhetoric. Smith’s poems detail a certain “Christian” reaction to homosexuality, i.e., its “sinfulness”:
Psalm (Queer)
Mom held the belt
in her hand, said she could
smack my face over
and over and enjoy it.
Yes, she said that.
Yes, she loved God that much.
And in the poem “The Problem with Straight People (What We Say Behind Your Back)”:
I hate straight students who look disgusted once they figure out I’m gay.
I hate straight men who imitate my voice when they think I can’t hear them.
I hate straight men who make their wrists limp when they think I can’t see them.
I hate straight men who joke about bending over for soap in the shower.
I hate straight men who have sex with men.
I hate straight women who say, “It’s such a waste that you’re gay.”
I hate straight people who say, “I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”
The writer Phillip Lopate suggests that the problem with confessional writing is that people don’t confess enough. In “The Art of the Personal Essay,” Lopate describes the dis-ease that writers often have using “I” and speaking in the first person. He writes, “Most people are brought up to think it is impolite to talk much about themselves.” While Aaron Smith’s poems aren’t precisely “confessional” –either in etiology or legacy --(saving discussions of the “shared architecture” of poetry and memoir for another time) to believe that they do manage to confess “enough.” They’re great poems.
At least “I” think so.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy" –
Honesty, little slut, must you insist
On hearing every dirty word I know
And all my worst affairs? Are impotence,
Insanity, and lying what you lust for?
Your hands are cold, feeling me in the dark.
—Edgar Bowers, “To the Contemporary Muse”
In his essay, “The Very Art of Telling: Sharon Olds and Writing Narrative Poetry,” Aaron Smith attempts to come to terms with his own sexuality within a nation filled with mixed messages: “As a gay person, I don’t believe I have the luxury of removing "me" from my poems. And, frankly, I’m tired of worrying about being relegated to the margins of contemporary poetry for writing about the body, for writing with emotion, or for using the narrative "I." Recently I saw a news article about a politician in Alabama who is introducing a bill to the legislature with the hopes of removing all public funding from libraries and universities that have books with gay or bisexual characters in them or that promote homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. My first thought was: This is absurd. Just because we aren’t talked about doesn’t mean that we don’t exist. Then it occurred to me: If we aren’t talked about, do we really exist?”
Aaron Smith is a poet who grew up in Appalachia and later moved to New York City. (Risking the confessional to interject that this is something that “I” have also done.) Smith, also like “myself,” grew up reading the confessional poets of the mid-twentieth century: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell among others. Confessional poetry was an attempt to articulate, in an open and direct way, feelings that had previously gone unsaid in American poetry. Confessional poets spoke of divorce, alcoholism, mental illness. They spoke of abortions and miscarriages and cancer.
Aaron Smith’s latest poetry collection, Appetite, (2012, University of Pittsburgh Press) is all about being gay. They are poems which range from despair to humor-- all of it grounded in an awareness of gayness. Growing up in an evangelical household in West Virginia, Smith felt, from an early age, the effect of being an outsider in a culture that finds a doctrinal delight in hateful rhetoric. Smith’s poems detail a certain “Christian” reaction to homosexuality, i.e., its “sinfulness”:
Psalm (Queer)
Mom held the belt
in her hand, said she could
smack my face over
and over and enjoy it.
Yes, she said that.
Yes, she loved God that much.
And in the poem “The Problem with Straight People (What We Say Behind Your Back)”:
I hate straight students who look disgusted once they figure out I’m gay.
I hate straight men who imitate my voice when they think I can’t hear them.
I hate straight men who make their wrists limp when they think I can’t see them.
I hate straight men who joke about bending over for soap in the shower.
I hate straight men who have sex with men.
I hate straight women who say, “It’s such a waste that you’re gay.”
I hate straight people who say, “I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”
The writer Phillip Lopate suggests that the problem with confessional writing is that people don’t confess enough. In “The Art of the Personal Essay,” Lopate describes the dis-ease that writers often have using “I” and speaking in the first person. He writes, “Most people are brought up to think it is impolite to talk much about themselves.” While Aaron Smith’s poems aren’t precisely “confessional” –either in etiology or legacy --(saving discussions of the “shared architecture” of poetry and memoir for another time) to believe that they do manage to confess “enough.” They’re great poems.
At least “I” think so.
April 24, 2013
I loved this open and honest book of poems. It was refreshing, entertaining, and thought-provoking. I could relate to many of the poems on a personal level. It is definitely a collection I will read more than once.
December 6, 2012
Really enjoyed this short book of very open and honest poems!
January 16, 2013
Could've gone farther, but didn't. Entertaining, campy, but lacked linguistic vigor, distance from the prosaic.
May 8, 2014
The emotion Aaron Smith captures in six lines is what most writers spend an entire novel trying to accomplish. Brilliantly lithe. He is an absolute force.
February 5, 2016
Always perceptive, Smith writes angry, witty, humorous poems that speak of everyday actions and tell what this gay man is really thinking. Found them to be true! What more can you ask of poetry!
September 7, 2014
4 and 1/2 starts. Compelling from start to finish.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews