Poetry. This first book by Erin Elizabeth Smith, a formidable poet, editor, and publisher, is accessible, yet visceral and true. Covering family life, travel, the reading life, and friendship, it is an edgy book that is both beautiful and disturbing. Erin Elizabeth Smith understands the value of the musical line and stanzaic development. She is a necessary new voice in poetry. "Erin Elizabeth Smith's debut book of poems, THE FEAR OF BEING FOUND, is adamantly itself. Smith's nervy, plangent lyrics question and reject assumptions, outfit themselves for uncertainty in a world where wind is "young and bitter" and "cicadas sound like a factory of lathes." Personal and metaphysical, mythic and immediate, these poems are elegant as a pair of white gloves and fierce as a set of fangs"--Angela Ball.

The Fear of Being Found

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Erin Elizabeth

Poetry

Three Candles Press

Erin Elizabeth Smith's The Naming of Strays is on fire in the best possible way--the poems sizzle with sensuality, celebrating all the senses in the way that the best blues music tips us from sadness into full-throated joy. The poems keep moving, shifting, defying expectations, singing the literal and the dream world, exalting the narrative and the experimental. I will recommend this book for poetry workshops as a primer on what poetry is and can do. And for seasoned readers, Erin Elizabeth Smith's work reminds us of why we fell in love with poetry in the first place. -MARILYN KALLET, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Tennessee/ Erin Elizabeth Smith's poems are delicious - it is hard to resist them. But they bite back, and that is the thing: they're painful, too. And gorgeous, always. The Naming the Strays is luminous, intimate, and never afraid. - PAUL GUEST, author of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge / Erin Elizabeth Smith's poetry is the impossible love child of a young Jorie Graham and a old bottle of Jack Daniel's. -T.A. NOONAN, author of Petticoat Government & The Bone Folders

The Naming of Strays

Literary

Gold Wake Press

Erin Elizabeth Smith's Down is immediately a delight.&nbsp; Refreshing in its take on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the reader discovers here the odd world and new experience that Smith draws them "down" into.&nbsp; The fall that seems endless takes us into Tennessee, where "petals doodle lawns / like the drawings of girls" or where "grey squirrels / chase themselves into their trees."&nbsp; This isn't exactly Lewis Carroll surrealism, but the narrator of these poems takes us into her incantations and dreamscapes, where suddenly she looks at her spouse lying on the sofa and sees "a foreign // thing, a stammering king / made kitten in the shaking." Waking does not necessarily relieve the narrator, nor us.&nbsp; Rather, she writes, "I am still falling / through the slippery leaves / every bit of anorexic ice, / still waking like a child roused / in the backseat, unsure where I am / in the fragile, new dark."&nbsp; And, like Alice, curiouser and curiouser, the trip down means we may rise up, that "it can heal us again."&nbsp;

Down

Stephen F. Austin University Press

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Books by Smith, Erin Elizabeth