Turnstone Press

Smith’s short prose narratives are woven through simple declarative statements and occasional interrogatives, but subverted by interruption and indeterminacy. Propelled by surprising shifts of trajectory and movement—aurally, visually, semantically, texturally, conceptually—they trace with risky abandon (and doses of witty wordplay), fidelity to his physical sensory witness of the world. Each word and tone is a precise stroke of the fluid present transforming into ‘idea.’ Life’s lived in moments—watching sparrows, sipping latté, listening to Etta James, agonizing over our violations to the natural and social environment. Read, re-read, re-heard, meanings and revelations form with luminous clarity. This latest and richest book in Fluttertongue, his innovative serial project, Smith confirms that he, as much as any writer, perpetuates the legacy left by bpNichol and The Martyrology.

Blessed with a savvy eye and a sound ear, Steven Ross Smith turns verse with a sure hand. Each poem is a splendid meditation that makes brilliant abracadabra out of the bric-a-brac of everyday pleasures and perils. Smith names debts to Ashbery and Willis, but his prose lyrics are also Beat-ific, reminding one of Bob Dylan’s Tarantula and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Sho nuf. Bottom line? Smith’s poems are top-o-the-line.

Hear: “Every day a new poet is discovered by a different reader who meets a resonant sensibility, though strange.”