Destruction of Man

INCLUDES FLEXI DISC OF SMITH READING WITH ACCORDION (Emily Ondine Wittman) & DRUM (Craig Pickering) ACCOMPANIMENT. PLUS PHOTOS TAKEN BY THE POET OF THE FARM HE WORKS AT THAT INSPIRED THE BOOK. “Abraham Smith’s Destruction of Man is a compass setting toward musics caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of river.”—Tyehimba Jess, Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn’t work: this won’t either: yet Destruction of Man is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar county–stung body; stung land–as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what’s left, and the hawk ate what’s left, and then the hawk died of old age. This is a book-length poem about small-scale family farming in the midst of the “get-big-or-get-out” mantra and foghorn. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrud