A Sphere Encased in Fires and Life

Powerful forces at work in this poetry, a collection of mature reflection and intense epiphany, wherein we learn that we exist within a cauldron that we cannot name, amid forces beyond the ken of seismologists and those who would map the cosmos. Are our hearts no more or less than what pulls upon them? Is experience a phenomenon we are ill equipped to measure, except through poetry? Who attempts to answer such questions as these, except a poet of Jared Smith's measure?

This magnificent volume of poetry-as-witness lifts up and dignifies the life we hold in common, illuminating that which is largely hidden within both the personal impulses and impersonal systems that drive and constrain us. The propulsive, elevating, and varied poems build upon each other toward an epic revelation of how our pride and dependence on technological growth blinds us with its short term gains. The resulting vision is one of dark and churning machinery within which everything is connected, the world becoming a vast fabric woven of passions and failures, of lights and shadows, exploration and exploitation leading to war and pandemic. There is individual freedom and survival to be found, but it is in finding the light within each individual's hard-won experience and compassion and understanding of the spheres we are a part of.

Poetry.