Adaptations - by Va Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From quiet domestic scenes to sweeping ecological meditations, VA Smith's Adaptations traverses personal grief, cultural reckoning, and environmental crisis, always returning to the question of how we endure and evolve. Adaptation as trope, science, and story is a throughline in this collection. Its title nods both to accommodations to change as well as correcting/resisting a variety of existential, environmental, and historical toxins. In free verse and fixed forms, and in a variety of styles and idioms, a central speaker acts as a Greek/pop chorus, singing songs about an imperiled natural world as well as the tragi-comic adaptations of human being. The collection concludes with a Mobius strip series, "On Evolutionary Adaptability: A Cthulucene, Sonnet Crown." These final poems ask the reader to participate in a decentered human, activist planetary repair rather than adapt to the sufferings of climate-driven doom.

About the Author

A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith's work has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Third Wednesday, After Happy Hour Review and SWIMM. Her first two books, Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters, were published by Kelsay Books in 2022 and 2023, respectively. A former Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence awardee at Penn State University as a former Professor of Teaching in the Department of English, VA later founded Chancellor Writing Services.