Word Comix: Poems

Charlie Smith's "shimmering energy" (Mary Oliver) pushes against the barriers of imagination and the American language.

Taking as his starting point such wide-ranging subjects as comic books, politics, romantic love, geology, newspapers, totalitarianism, the natural world, the classics, Paris, Miami Beach, and war, Charlie Smith has written freshly realized poems in which compassion and tough mindedness touch the deep core of our humanness.

From “Abuses in the Big Hotels”

The old man they watched six years straight do nothing

yet

died between shifts. He left a bloody shirt once, in

Tenerife,

and never went back for it. “I loved,” the dictator says,

“the way my mother’s body moved when she strolled

along

holding herself in her arms. I have always loved

the elegant sway, the curve like infinity’s cul de sac,

the seductive and unappeasable ...” and stops talking.