Smith, Abraham: Ashagalomancy

Ashagalomancy by Abraham Smith (Action Books, paperback) Publication Date: November 1, 2015 Publisher Marketing: 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