Insomniac Sentinel - by Abraham Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.

Abraham Smith's Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith's nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.

Review Quotes

"This message from the kinetic yet ghostly realm of
Wisconsin that suffuses Abraham Smith's Insomniac Sentinel alive with its rural
glossary, with its hidden waking clandestinely complex within seeming quotidian
display. It scripts a lingual fuse of heresy, that absorbs particulates of
human brewing, and what follows is a slow magnetic glow that suffuses the text
not unlike a susurrant under-ringing. Thus, it emits by complexity by this glow
letting us know that verbal life continues to not only thrive but quietly erupt
and cascade from regions that we seemingly thought to be inert, always
poetically aware of yielding circuitous treasure from what was thought to be a
less than magnetic hamlet." - Will
Alexander, Pulitzer finalist for
Refractive Africa and author of The Contortionist Whispers

"you know, i am the giver/back of sound." This bardic claim
could only be true of Abraham Smith, who sings open-throatedly the continuous
song of a crane lifting off the junkpile and into history's storm. His song
pushes through and around the language of working, of working bodies, both
human and inhuman, raising it all up, illuminating it, as in a manuscript,
indicating what is precious, as if sound could be the one thing it is not, and
shed light. That's the sad note in this "gravy-to-cradle" threnody, this
"lunged-up thud tender." Reading Abraham Smith makes you ask the big questions,
like, are our wings made of the shreds of where we came from? Does a bird fly
on its wing, or on its song?" -- Joyelle
McSweeney, author of
Toxicon and Arachne

"I can hear Abraham Smith's voice intoning in his
breathless and headlong fashion throughout his latest collection of poems. The
verses practically read themselves to me, accompanied by an insistent rhythm a
backbeat for music that these poems conjure up." -
Charlie Parr, Smithsonian Folkways recording
artist and author of Last of the Better Days Ahead

"Abraham Smith is one of my favorite living poets keeping
the art form alive. He is patiently stoking the fires of imagination and his
persistence has kept the cinders of inspiration smoldering. It is a joy to read
his work and thrill to hear him read it in person." - Margo
Price, Grammy nominee, Farm Aid board member, and author of Maybe
We'll Make It

About the Author

Abraham Smith's recent publications include Insomniac Sentinel (Baobab Press, 2023), Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2022), and Bear Lite Inn (New Michigan Press,2020). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns; their records It Never Ends (2023) and Break Your Heart (2020) were released on Mississippi's Dial Back Sound. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State.