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"How can a thing glint even as it's still? Ask Reed Smith. He speaks the dying language of morning light, rivers, burlap shadows, and coyotes' "early barks [...] slapping flatwater," inspects all our dust and rot and manages yet to marvel. Reading Declarations of Hunger felt like slipping along in a secret canoe, deep in a landscape of grief and tenderness, where the marsh hawk stares back and "truth always makes a curve." I think we can trust this voice-its intimacy as much as its restraint. Smith's poems get good and close, enough to hear the rasp of snake scales and to be honest about what a man sees in the mirror. To warn us about fingers in the hourglass. To test every door."
-Allison Adair, author of The Clearing
"Smith reminds us that until we can divest from our massy entailments, our dis-eased and "loculated bodies" persist with their sad animal hunger, drawing sustenance from the nitrate- and blood-soaked earth. America remains mostly fields-even as we marginalize them in our digitally obsessed cultural imaginary-ravaged by weather and industry, where "Fermented / in Disneyworld bacteria, embryos fasciculate / in polluted foam." These poems combat the trivialization of our food's origins and the fates of our waste, knowing the earth is a record of our devastations, yet our hope for survival."
-Joe Fletcher, author of The Hatch
"Some poetry slows time to a crawl, the intonation of an image or phrase a kind of musculature developing right before your very eyes. You can sense the perspiration, the struggle of becoming, each breath thickening the air. "Drink its water / and the universe expands invisibly / inside you." Spirit is a thing we make unto ourselves, and Declarations of Hunger is full of spirit. The world teeters on its fulcrum and Smith takes note, a kind of bravery in witness. This man's heart hits you like an ambush."
-Joe Pan, author of Florida Palms
About the author
Reed Smith was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1978. He graduated from The University of Texas and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has lived in many parts of the country, and has been a paramedic, a teacher, a geriatric advance care practitioner, and an actor who performed at The Globe, Orange Tree, and Swan Theatres in England. He lives in Hollywood, Florida, with his wife and twin daughters. This is his debut book of poems.
