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

Review quotes forthcoming from:

Michael Earl Craig is an American poet and farrier living in Livingston, Montana. He was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1970. Craig is the author of six books of poetry. His work has been included in the anthologies Isn't It Romantic, Everyman's Library Poems About Horses, and The Best American Poetry.

Courtney Marie Andrews is an American singer-songwriter originally from Phoenix, Arizona. She released her first widely distributed and breakthrough studio album, Honest Life, in 2016, with her latest album Loose Future in 2022.

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.