The Postcult Heart

On the eve of her wedding, a mother hands her daughter an unpublished manuscript—a collection of love poems—written by the famous poet and matriarch, Earth Laureate Booker Makepeace. Booker had bequeathed the manuscript to her own daughter, Fleetwood, on the eve of her wedding, and then vanished. What do they mean, these tales of love? Are they instructions? Warnings? Documentaries? Clues? Lies? Revelations? Prayers? Praise? Lovesongs? For the Makepeace women, this unpublished treasure it is all they have left to live by.

The Postcult Heart is an existential meditation on love exploring both its creative promise and abiding costs. Written as a series of feminist epistles from fictional women, these poems chart the sexual, emotional, creative and psycho-geographic dynamics of imaginary lovers, paying particular attention to the erotics of absence. Presuming to tell the love stories of real women, The Postcult Heart offers a grim yet gorgeous wisdom won through a moral intensity that is fierce, raking, but also forgiving. As a collection these poems are a dreamlike prayer for a fallen world, rhetorical experiments in love and loss offered with astonishing insight into the human struggle. The materiality of love is treated as our most urgent subject, and the poems deal with the dissolution and breakdown of love as a force of modernist salvation with a disciplined and sensual embrace of language. Extending the domain of the confessional voice into new and electrifying territory, The Postcult Heart sings with a full, lyrical heart to that most fundamental and amazing of subjects, love.

"These poems are a silver needle filled with the strangest sort of dope. The trip is both brutal and beautiful. The hallucinations are true. And I'm laughing over the pain. Bradley Smith has done it again.

– Charlie LeDuff, Pulitzer Prize author of Sh*tshowl, Detroit and US Guys