Surgencies

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.

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 InstructionReading Surgencies aloud produces wonderful rumblings in the chest. It makes me think of Tibetan throat singing, and the didgeridoo, and big trains in the night. The Abraham Smith effect is vocamotive. And its spell will reach you. —Michael Earl Craig, Iggy HorseFurther praise for Abraham Smith:Abraham Smith's [poetry] is a compass setting toward musics caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of river. —Tyehimba Jess, Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for PoetryI’ve been unable to decide if the best way to describe [Smith] is as punk gone agrarian or if the agrarians went punk. — Juliana Spahr, Winner of the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry PrizePart song, part guttural wail into the American rural landscape, [Smith's poetry] is a breathtaking lyric that’s as complex and heartbreaking as the country itself. — Ada Limón, twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States of AmericaAbraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head. — Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By TruckersFor over a decade, Abraham Smith has been pouring out into the night of American poetry a brilliantly made, variegated song. Smith’s jangling, brainy, tonically surprising and lyrically cornucopic work is undoubtedly influential but ultimately inimitable . . . Smith confects an entire mythic system, singing into existence a universe made of the ruins of the last one, whatever’s lying around the yard. — Johannes Goransson, The New Quarantine