The Other Lover

by Bruce Smith

The Other Lover is a collection of bittersweet American love poems. Writing with jazz-like verbal panache, Bruce Smith reaches for the paradoxical pulls between sweetness and bitterness. With carefully crafted rhyming stanzas and unpredictable free verse rhythms, these poems bristle and pop like the riffs of a virtuoso horn player. The book is a personal, passionate, disturbing collection that places the reader both inside and outside of the poet's life. Deftly filtering personal experiences through improvisatory structures and a wide range of idioms, Smith communicates the want, the lack, the desire for what is missing, the sweetness of absence and pain. The pleasure of The Other Lover is in the imagination's dance in the erotic spaces between the poet and the reader.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2000

Reviews

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Bruce Smith when I found this book, browsing in a used book store last month. (This is mostly how I discover new poets to love.) I'm amazed at Smith's language ("the boy's heart, not my own but a bristling thing, / like a pine cone or the fur of an animal"), imagery ("I will conduct my intolerance like lightning into the earth"), and insights ("the romantic see the mad as suffering the truth"). When I finished the book I looked him up online and learned that this book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

[Monique · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few of the poems are really superb. I saw him at a poetry reading a few years ago and was very impressed.