Abraham Smith

Insomniac Sentinel Abraham Smith

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 cotemporary, rolling
from the throats of giants.
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