The Naming of Strays

Erin Elizabeth Smith's The Naming of Strays is on fire in the best possible way--the poems sizzle with sensuality, celebrating all the senses in the way that the best blues music tips us from sadness into full-throated joy. The poems keep moving, shifting, defying expectations, singing the literal and the dream world, exalting the narrative and the experimental. I will recommend this book for poetry workshops as a primer on what poetry is and can do. And for seasoned readers, Erin Elizabeth Smith's work reminds us of why we fell in love with poetry in the first place. -MARILYN KALLET, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Tennessee/ Erin Elizabeth Smith's poems are delicious - it is hard to resist them. But they bite back, and that is the thing: they're painful, too. And gorgeous, always. The Naming the Strays is luminous, intimate, and never afraid. - PAUL GUEST, author of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge / Erin Elizabeth Smith's poetry is the impossible love child of a young Jorie Graham and a old bottle of Jack Daniel's. -T.A. NOONAN, author of Petticoat Government & The Bone Folders