UNKILLABLE ANGEL GOES TO THE CINEMA
poems, Barton Smock
185 pages (hardcover)
September 2026
back cover image by Aidan Smock
in-book illustrations and photographs by
Noah Michael Smock
Jude Smock
Mary Ann Gutierrez
Aidan Smock
Collection is pay-what-you-want. Be sure to include your name/address details in the comment section of payment type. Email bartonsmock@yahoo.com for free PDF if interested in reviewing.
can be purchased via:
paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
CashApp $BartonSmock
Short film for my collection (57 Letters to Ethan Hawke, or I wanted to stop saying god)
Filmed, selected, and edited by my son Aidan Smock.
Selected by and starring my son Noah Michael Smock.
Selected works from the book:
Letter 071224
Dear Ethan Hawke
In Ohio there is a black frog with a star on its back that no one has ever seen. Men trip each other to death.
Letter 062224
Dear Ethan Hawke
I deleted this letter. This is the new one.
Letter 072324 someone smuggled a bone into heaven
Dear Ethan Hawke
Someone smuggled a bone into heaven.
Letter 062824 voiceovers
Dear Ethan Hawke
Nothing creation makes is as ghostless as a baby. If a being needs rest, then a being can get sick, get better, be killed. Pain keeps the body in the past. I drink in the present.
Letter 071724
Dear Ethan Hawke
I feel I’ve been in the room where I’ll die. My little nod to a flower is god at this hour.
Letter 072524
Dear Ethan Hawke
I am sitting on a diving board with a rabbit in my lap. Most of the rabbit is dead. I try with my shadow to moan through the water. A stillness stretches god.
~
Book info HERE
Rate the film on letterboxd HERE
I have all the words that have gone missing to say that I am thankful for being in the August 2021 run of Poem-A-Day at poets.org as guest edited by Kazim Ali
Read the poem here
about the poem:
“I can't speak for all fathers, but my own fathering is littered with necessary and fake finalities. As such, I wrote this poem by hand on a small piece of paper while worrying about the long and short lives of my children. In the spacing of the poem, I tried to honor the little room I'd given myself for its projected concerns.”
the wrist
cutter's hot
mirror
God makes a small noise out of a smaller
My mouth has a password it doesn't know
Death has one dream that's all a dream
I am younger than what I touch
Clueless
photos
A perfectionist as they imagine for the first time the face of god being seen by another
Romantic Abjection
Danielle Chelosky
Far West Press, 2026
A vanishing diarist possessed of a spiraling insistence, Danielle Chelosky is a writer whose prose leaves one automatically and impulsively blue as it does this then does that then does its magical and melancholy things enough to trick a pony into being a whole other pony anxious it’s appeared without a trace. In Romantic Abjection (Far West Press, 2026) there is some third spell being sounded out by one scrawling fanfic toward the forms that distance makes from premade scratch. Time has a body it can’t use. Death is afraid of god in a way that sleep isn’t. Does touch survive suddenly or does it live forewarned? You’ll hear something, this I know. This I don’t: An angel prays more than once to unsee its ghost nudes. In Romantic Abjection’s now, a feeling is there for a sec and then there the second it’s gone. Please read near enough to Danielle Chelosky that you read their writing.
I can't read my own handwriting any longer. Your memory though is still the angel that can't kill itself. I am trying to be a single thing that a car can hit. Car made whole. I get on my knees and put my palm on a psalm. Being drunk is a belonging one hides from a loss that will never look. Sound a footstep god uses to scare the lonely. A fly exists to avoid fly sadness.
anybody can say what they did for a day
in the world I was crying alot and people started to like me
Birth is a kidnapping that leaves no one behind.
My loneliness has a past
that yours
can forget. Oh
God.
kingsoftrain 