Multiverse - 8489

Before reading the poems in Mike Smith's remarkable new book, the reader must take a good long look at his opening note on method. Smith means and does just what he says in this note. I've seen these acts of Houdini-magic unfolding over the last several years, and I've published a number of them in Notre Dame Review. To watch Mike Smith load himself with chains and then escape with a kind of elegant grace is astonishing. The more ambitious poems in "Anagrams of America" - the anagram of Pound's first Canto, for example, and the whole of "Multiverse: A Bestiary" - are expressions of a weird and even troubling genius. I don't know of anything else quite like them anywhere. -John Matthias Reading Mike Smith's Multiverse is like watching Adam bring forth new creatures from the mud of language by breathing their name. Two books in one, one a bestiary of bodies, the other a personal history, both are a tour de force of the anagram: a thrilling demonstration of how the constraints of language and living produce poetry in life, as poem after poem infects one another. -Steve Tomasula
ASIN: 1935402714
VSKU: BVV.1935402714.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Smith, Mike
Binding: Paperback