Join us for a reading from poets Abraham Smith and Greg Brownderville. Abraham will be sharing work from his most recent collection, Destruction of Man.

“Abraham Smith’s Destruction of Man 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 Poetry

Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn’t work: this won’t either: yet Destruction of Man is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar county—stung body; stung land—as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what’s left, and the hawk ate what’s left, and then the hawk died of old age. This is a book-length poem about small-scale family farming in the midst of the “get-big-or-get-out” mantra and foghorn. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrude Stein: “After all anybody is as their land and air is.”

Abraham Smith (above left) is the author of five poetry collections—Destruction of Man (Third Man Books, 2018); Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007)—and one coauthored fiction collection, Tuskaloosa Kills (Spork Press, 2018). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. His creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. He recently completed a poetry manuscript about cranes—birds whose song and stature electrify him. He lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University.

Greg Brownderville (above right) is the author of A Horse with Holes in It (LSU Press, 2016), Deep Down in the Delta (Butler Center, 2012), and Gust (Northwestern University Press, 2011). At SMU in Dallas, he serves as Associate Professor of English, Director of Creative Writing, and Editor of Southwest Review.