Poetry. "If Frank Stanford got up from the dead to slam (and slammed to win), what he would say might well resemble the poems in WHIM MAN MAMMON. That said, Abe Smith's got his own lizard thing going on here: No resurrection required. This is deft work--and hefty work (as in big and as in bag)--that squeezes gallon after gallon of the 21st century's natural and cultural detritus into one marvelous sack of song. To my mind, it's the most useful writing from a Wisconsinite since Joe Garden's window signs at Badger Liquor. There is no higher compliment"--Graham Foust.

Whim Man Mammon

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Abraham

Poetry

Action Books

Poetry. "In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's HANK risks a caterwauling quagmire both lyric and epic in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paean to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving, and raw. HANK is an 'elegy for gravel' along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry"--Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

Hank

Poetry. "Abraham Smith carries greatness like a splinter in the lining of the heart. He carries it like a poison drunk up in infancy, a bone shard that traveled from a smashed rib or a flint of exploitation that was planted there by a bad friend or a wasted economic system. Yet music pours from Smith like blood, cheap wine, car-radio and bird song. Abe is an ecstatic, standing outside himself and singing to himself, the whole pulling- apart yet encapsulated pageant of Keats' Nightingale played out in the person of one poet."—Joyelle McSweeney

Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer

Poetry. For over a decade, Abraham Smith has been pouring out into the night of American poetry a brilliantly made, variegated song. Smith's jangling, brainy, tonically surprising and lyrically cornucopic work is undoubtedly influential but ultimately inimitable. In this his fourth book, Smith confects an entire mythic system, singing into existence a universe made of the ruins of the last one, whatever's lying around the yard. ASHAGALOMANCY shows us the poet at the height of his powers, a poet of reach, tenderness, ambition, a gimlet eye and a vatic voice. "towards his day job so much trip stiffness / until one warms into the working / and then it's like swimming and then it's like milking the / eyes of the kinder dead to repaint these rooms" Praise for Abraham Smith: "Mash Gertrude Stein with agrarian folk and you have the unholy matrimony of Abraham Smith's debut, WHIM MAN MAMMON."—Cathy Park Hong "If Frank Stanford got up from the dead to slam (and slammed to win), what he would say might well resemble the poems in WHIM MAN MAMMON. That said, Abe Smith's got his own lizard thing going on here: No resurrection required. This is deft work-and hefty work (as in big and as in bag)-that squeezes gallon after gallon of the 21st century's natural and cultural detritus into one marvelous sack of song. To my mind, it's the most useful writing from a Wisconsinite since Joe Garden's window signs at Badger Liquor. There is no higher compliment."—Graham Foust "Here is a magnificent transmission, designed from both way back and way ahead, to be read and read again."—Blake Butler "In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's HANK risks a caterwauling quagmire both lyric and epic in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. It belongs only to the future of American poetry."—Joshua Marie Wilkinson "[H]is is the ontology of the sacred juke."—Tim Earley

Ashagalomancy

Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told through colloquialism and a minding of song. Music has a scent and the song logic as this book meanders along that broken and disjointed road. Regional writing is a curse, it seems; but this book is unabashedly regional, in the sense that Smith sought to translate the stories of his native county--and thereby the fading gleam or echo of a dying agrarian lifeway. This is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. More broadly, this is a book-length poem about culture history and masculinity and our rupturing and sometimes obliterating elisions with machines. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. Gertrude Stein said the seed of DESTRUCTION OF MAN: "After all anybody is as their land and air is."

DESTRUCTION OF MAN

Third Man Books

This Guide reads the Gospel of Mark as a 1st-century CE story about Jesus, for his followers, and against tyranny or the abusive use of power. 
First, the book shows students how the Gospel uses the form of a traditional laudatory biography (a 'Life') to reshape the memory of the shame-ridden trials and suffering of Jesus. Such a biography portrayed Jesus' descent (as a son of God), his deeds, and his heroic death, dispelling any notion that the teacher Jesus was a charlatan or huckster. 
Second, Smith demonstrates how the Gospel devotes a great deal of space to Jesus' training of his disciples - as he calls, commissions, and corrects them in preparation for the difficult moments of their journey.
Third, Smith highlights the Gospel's special characterizations of Jesus - as a prophetic envoy, a man of authority, and a philosophical hero - contrasting Jesus' use of power with the abusive use of power by Rome's representatives (Herod Antipas and Pilate).

Mark: An Introduction and Study Guide: Shaping the Life and Legacy of Jesus (T&T Clark’s Study Guides to the New Testament)

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

T&T Clark

This Guide reads the Gospel of Mark as a first-century CE story about Jesus, for his followers, and against tyranny or the abusive use of power. First, the book examines how the Gospel uses the form of a traditional laudatory biography (a 'Life') to reshape the memory of the shame-ridden trials and suffering of Jesus. Such a biography portrayed Jesus' descent (as a son of God), his deeds, and his heroic death, dispelling any notion that the teacher Jesus was a charlatan or huckster. Second, by examining how the Gospel devotes so much space to Jesus' training of his disciples-as he calls, commissions, and corrects them in preparation for the difficult moments of their journey-, this Guide also presents Mark's biography as an inspirational story for disciples. Such learners would be eager to profit from the mistakes that the Markan disciples made in their journey. Third, by highlighting the Gospel's special characterizations of Jesus-as a prophetic envoy, a man of authority, and a philosophical hero-this Guide contrasts Jesus' use of power (authorized, liberating, lasting, and others-directed) with the abusive use of power by Rome's representatives (Herod Antipas and Pilate). The Gospel of Mark sets itself against any type of tyranny: the tyranny associated with bad courts and the tyranny associated with bad choices. So if readers of Mark display the values of Jesus, they will be able to stand as valiantly as he did when they face their own sufferings (as in Mark 13.9-13) at the hands of established authorities.

Mark: Shaping the Life and Legacy of Jesus (Phoenix Guides to the New Testament)

Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd.

Bear Lite Inn

New Michigan Press

Insomniac Sentinel

Baobab Press

Fiction. TUSKALOOSA KILLS has the teeth of a saw. And the eyes of a wolf. It's a patchwork prose back-and-forth--it's a heady screwloose brew of marblemouth and jughead musings upon a famous football town with a clandestine literary history. TUSKALOOSA KILLS is a soapbox upon which McWaters and Smith howl of how humans make community and community unmakes humans. Think threads and scraps, interlaced and unraveling: how a yarn isn't bellyached from one voice but through a spice-cabinet of voices--heard, misheard, remembered, misremembered, and echoing for one more round.

Tuskaloosa Kills

McWaters, Scott

Spork Press

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