Surgencies - by Abraham Smith (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In Surgencies, Abraham Smith responds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. Each line is an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow. Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster.

In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast.

Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get honey-skulled.

Review Quotes

Abraham Smith weaves whimsy with his words. This is a magical collection filled with lines that echo long after they're read. - Courtney Marie Andrews, American Singer-Songwriter

Reading Abraham Smith's Surgencies one is unmoored and swept away in the poetic river, serenaded by the tetradactyl calls of cranes and frogs. Brief eddies give way to a surge of words that goes on and on through memory and song. And like John Muir once said, "We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it." - Adrian Kien, The Caress Is a Letter of Instruction

About the Author

Abraham Smith hails from Ladysmith, Wisconsin. His recent poetry collections include Insomniac Sentinel (Baobab Press, 2023) and Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2022). Away from his desk, he improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns on the albums It Never Ends (DBS/Don Giovanni, 2023) and Break Your Heart (Dial Back Sound, 2020). Smith lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State University.