The Other Lover (Phoenix Poets) [Paperback]

Bruce Smith (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226764087 | ISBN-13: 978-0226764085 | Publication Date: April 3, 2000 | Edition: 1

The Other Lover is a collection of bittersweet American love poems. Writing with jazz-like verbal panache, Bruce Smith reaches for the paradoxical pulls between sweetness and bitterness. With carefully crafted rhyming stanzas and unpredictable free verse rhythms, these poems bristle and pop like the riffs of a virtuoso horn player. The book is a personal, passionate, disturbing collection that places the reader both inside and outside of the poet's life. Deftly filtering personal experiences through improvisatory structures and a wide range of idioms, Smith communicates the want, the lack, the desire for what is missing, the sweetness of absence and pain. The pleasure of The Other Lover is in the imagination's dance in the erotic spaces between the poet and the reader.

Product Details

• Paperback: 98 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (April 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226764087
• ISBN-13: 978-0226764085
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,212,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 8 reasons to buy The Other Lover, May 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Other Lover (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

1. Because of the music. (Gerald Stern says, "There is some strange, some delightful, some outrageous music here.")

2. Because of the dirt. So much hydroponic poetry out there nowadays--poems subsisting proudly on nothing but water and air. Smith's poems have their roots where they should.

3. Because of the work, the politics, the pleasure, the real places & dreamed release, and all the other people outside and inside the "I."

Here's a piece of a poem with a title taken from Roethke, "I'll Make a Broken Music, or I'll Die": "If the four boiled men on my block / had speech beyond the wet kiss / from the imperfect embouchure / of their lips on the bottles of the shamrock- / emblazoned Tokay, and if this / emptied oil drum fueled by jilted furniture / could be their mouth, then they could sing / of the passing into darkness / with the perfect pitch and modulation / of silence and how it feels being / what's collected in the winds / and not the song. / / Of the almost-songs we are, this / voiceless one is the loudest."

4. Because these are the fierce and beautiful "almost-songs" of the other lover, the one who loves (hurt or be hurt) whatever might be left out of the voice, riding over it, sliding under it, "a shadow boxer, a small / class struggle, a mad and fearful girl, a plural."

5. Because these poems are hungry and so are you.

6. Because Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman never slept here, and you won't sleep either.

7. Because, come on, you're curious about what makes a book a finalist for BOTH the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

8. Because of the music.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm Never Tired of This Book, July 26, 2004

By 

Kevin Clark (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Other Lover (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

I've been reading Smith's book for months, and I don't stop. I have it on my desk with a few others that I keep going back to. I didn't even know I liked it the first time I read it. Smith's voice is different and gut-level right. It's not for folks who want their poetry prettified. It's for those who may want to feel something other than elegiac niceties. Something coming at you with the directness of high-velocity thought. His smarts is sharp and speedy.