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"All of the poems [in Hungry Ghosts] have Smith bearing witness to a time of moral, intellectual, and ethical crises, which, I'm sorry to say is OUR time. But unlike other "political" poetry-a kind of talk poetry where poets state their outrage with randomly right-justified line breaks-Smith's poems are as stylistically challenging as they are disturbing.
-Peter Johnson, Old Man Still Howling at the Moon (Substack)
"The work is not trying to dictate something. It is not trying to describe something. It is not trying to articulate a particular history. It is about inventing and developing the language of painting and evolving that in this moment." So says Egyptian American artist Julie Mehretu about her work started after the 2016 presidential election. Hungry Ghost looks for a language that speaks to the moment that feels both historical and personal.
"He is, and for a long time has been, one of our finest poets."
-Agha Shahid Ali
"Like no other modern American poet, he captures into language a flavor like that of jazz."
-Denis Johnson
"Bruce Smith's passionate attention to substance - things, people, events, places - is what forms thestructures of his poems, which are formal in the truest sense. They are made in a master'sunselfconscious knowledge of craft for the purpose of saying what is important. They are neither new nor old, but themselves, and they affect me deeply."
- Hayden Carruth
