Devotions (Phoenix Poets) [Paperback]

Bruce Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 2011 | Series: Phoenix Poets

In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG. These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what’s unspoken and unbidden. While we’re driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal is intersected—sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly—with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and “someone’s idea of beauty.” The poems fluctuate between the two poles of “lullaby and homicide” before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bruce Smith's new poems move fast and travel far. . . . Most books of new poems are either too long or leave readers wanting more. Devotions does neither; it is ample as well as ambitious, agile and unpredictable as well as viscerally affecting. For all that its born-to-run characters yearn for escape, it's a book to stay inside; it's exhausting to read, and yet it's a book to get lost in, one you won't exhaust any time soon."

(Stephen�Burt New York�Times�Book�Review )

"Smith's devotions are authoritative and capacious. Neither querulous nor slavish, they give pleasure, which is what we ask of them."

(Library Journal )

"In poems alternately sharp, slippery, and tender, Smith finds a way to take in almost everything—'Shooter Protocol,' Charlie Parker, high school shop class—moving seamlessly between critique and embrace. Smith's been closely watched for several books now, and this may be his best collection yet."

(Publishers Weekly )

"Devotions reads like a series of protean Ars Poeticas. The poems glow with ghost rhymes, hypnotic catalogues, and lyric enchantments that constitute 'a blues about the rules for distance and difficult love.' Bruce Smith is a poet I always read with awe and hunger. This amazing new book overwhelms me in the best possible ways."

(Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead , winner of the National Book Award )

About the Author

Bruce Smith is professor of English and creative writing at Syracuse University and the author of four books of poems. His book The Other Lover, also published by the University of Chicago Press, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Product Details

• Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1ST edition (April 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226764354
• ISBN-13: 978-0226764351
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.3 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,581 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb dense muscular linework. December 21, 2011

By Roy Kesey

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

How I loved this book. Constant slants: as in thematic shift, as in diagonal rhyme, as in the receiver coming short across the middle, his ribs about to be broken, and he knows this, stretches up for the ball anyway. Each movement working deeper and deeper, as if a miner, as if a sliver. Does its most excellent work in/on the mess that is contemporary America in all its bigness and smallness. I have a weakness for that particular ground, and don't know anyone working it to better effect.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars hugely talented, excessively displayed February 7, 2012

By Private Citizen

Format:Paperback

I'm an admirer of Bruce smith's poems. What creative energy he has and what Hopkinsesque
passion, what erotic undercharge, etc... but he drowns his poems in excess figurative language,
saturates them in baroque vocabulary, and generally turns poems from poems into
vogue-ish Herculean runway model performances. It's like being served a
nice drink by a bartender who keeps pouring and pouring,
as it foams up and overflows and soaks your whole arm-- a poem
whose writer is having more fun and pleasure than you are.
Even the project, here, devotions-- gets tiresome with reiteration.
Bruce Smith's best collection still is probably mercy seat. Amen.

5.0 out of 5 stars Ingenious Exuberance January 31, 2013

By R. Brezsny

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Smith's "Devotions" is lush, gorgeous, precise, earthy, and relentlessly generous. His ingenious exuberance invites readers to expand their capacity to see.