(…)

Kazim Ali, on Barton Smock’s Eating the Animal Back to Life:

(from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/pm-reading-list-november-2015/)

Speaking of being captivated, when I was in Cleveland’s most exciting new independent bookstore, Guide to Kulchur, I picked up on a whim a few small volumes that appeared to have been published by the author using Lulu. I was so entranced by the seemingly simple but endlessly complex, prickly lyrics that I wrote to the author, Barton Smock, through his blog, (kingsoftrain.wordpress.com). He’s been sending me books now and then and his latest, Eating the Animal Back to Life, is just knocking me out. These poems are desperate, tender, wry, alarmed, god-obsessed, and musically driven. Smock is not published by others, he does it all himself and so the only place you can get his books is here. All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.

~

book is here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/barton-smock/eating-the-animal-back-to-life/paperback/product-22277755.html

~

some poems from said book:

[opening line from a year with mother]

it crawled out of me and knew your birthday

[scarecrow and the lottery]

I can’t make heads or tails of your fervor. I can’t make body. I put a hole in my father and through it watch my mother eat her weight in god. I want what my siblings have. each other, game shows, memory. indigenous amnesia.

[extramural (iii)]

the fireplace is on drugs. get the good rope and tie it around the wrist of the hand I want dead.

–

on a drive I’ve undertaken to see my brother, it comes to me that odd things were being sold. jesus-on-a-stick. the crown of thorns, extra. I close my eyes. I dare the brain. the brain says it’s off to be forgiven.

–

brother has one ugly foot and one beautiful. I have this disorder causes me to fully remember dreams*

*dreams only

–

everything happened in 1985. words don’t mean. numbers mean. tell your gay father he has nothing to do with himself.

–

the wind is asleep. it sleeps outside.

[extramural (v)]

the people are looking for something that tells them what to show. my father can’t hear the storm for the honey on his knees. at birth, a blown eardrum gives the kid a way out of making friends. a sermon about washing a mountain with a rock takes a word from my mother’s mouth. grief is a good listener.

[Franz]

two girls replace two boys and continue the good work of making a cripple sandwich.

I become a woman to watch my mother die.

father
he jumps
less and less
rope.

things come in three raccoons
to rearrange
a rabbit.

a baby avoids the plague
like a first
word
amen.

brother gives hell to my sense of place.