works, where, and
my small press writing day entry:
http://mysmallpresswritingday.blogspot.com/2019/02/barton-smock-my-small-press-writing-day.html
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on my collection Ghost Arson, an interview by Crystal Stone for Flyway Journal:
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poems elsewhere:
https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/08/11/hungrily-poetic-an-interview-with-barton-smock/
https://thecollidescope.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/goodbyes-for-exodus/
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poems, inquiries:
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work:
Ghost Arson (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018)
15.00
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1
review by Dd. Spungin:
https://kingsoftrain.com/2018/11/28/dd-spungins-review-of-ghost-arson/
review by George Salis:
https://kingsoftrain.com/2018/12/17/review-by-george-salis-of-barton-smocks-ghost-arson/
at Cruel Garters:
https://www.facebook.com/Cruel-Garters-162917133824108/
I’ve been reading “Boy Musics,” a prose poem in the book Ghost Arson by Barton Smock. The poem perfectly captures that rarely whispered vulnerability that comes with being a boy (being human.) The poem opens with the speaker and his companion “counting cigarettes on the roof of a closed sex shop in Ohio,” an apt setting to explore what is open, what might be okay to share. The speaker shares that his father is gay; the companion shares “three poems by [his] dead sister, the third of which she called dead sister.” These kids are doomed, as left to their Mid-American whatever as Ohio, as passed over as the lower middle class. It’s “too late for crow and all the deer have been hit.”
Still, there’s a tenderness here. Poetry survives unlikely odds, as does sex. Smock confesses only what needs confessing. The poem and its companions in Ghost Arson never fail to surprise in their detail, and they never flinch as they stare down the big themes: “a vacuum runs below us. you ask me if I’ve ever wanted to see her handwriting. it’s nothing like yours but maybe one day.” These lines that conclude the poem give me shivers. This whole business is visceral. I love the book, but seeing the handwriting might break my heart.
-Glen Armstrong
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works, privately self published:
animal masks on the floor of the ocean, 124 pages, June 2019
Motherlings, 52 pages, June 2019
an old idea one had of stars, 58 pages, February 2020
all self-published collections are free with request made to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
or with donation of any amount
via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-1
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