Touché

By Rod Smith Description Reviews Well-known for his radical poetics and politics, Rod Smith’s Touché turns yet another Avant-Garde corner. Ranging from conceptual and flarf to high lyric and even confessional works the poems in Touché toss the reader into the seemingly infinite possibilities Smith’s style(s) inhabit. Touché's repartee is both inventive and humorous, intense and open. His jazzy absurdities talk back to the Flarf poets and the earlier L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, but their freewheeling aims bring them at least as close to earlier kinds of aural experiment. Publishers Weekly In Touché, Rod Smith weaves the internet generation together with Robert Creeley and William Carlos Williams. The old Yeat’s nugget, “Poetry makes nothing happen” is contorted and refracted through all of Smith’s lines to discuss how the great nothing is happening all around us. Benjamin Champagne, NewPages Rod Smith’s “protagonist” is rebellious at times and always inventive. His work digs int