Communion

Literary Nonfiction. Essay. In this collection of twenty-one essays, Curtis Smith explores religion and fear, memory and dreams, aging and happiness, with the skill bestowed only to masters of their craft. The eloquent pieces in COMMUNION address a father's love for his child and the moments he knows will be gone all too quickly. Seen through the eyes of an older parent, we are spared the sentimentality and clichés of childrearing, and instead gifted the rare and laconic wisdom of a father who understands, in the present, the gravity of each conversation or hike into the woods with his son. Smith's sincere modesty, coupled with his precise prose, gives this new collection its charm and heft. The essays in COMMUNION reiterate what it means to be a father, and invite us to follow a son as he leaves the insulated world of childhood and to wish him well as though he was our own.