(ETC, current, wasps)

from Wasp,gasp. (Incunabula 2023)

birthplace 71

I have my pipe and my pictures of the crucifixion. My brother says 'rabbit, rabbit' above a frog. My brother is dead, but only on the moon. The frog is dead all over.

/

Praise for Wasp, gasp.

The worlds of these poems are apocalyptic. Is it the past searching for the present or the present searching for the past? How does one reconcile all of this life but trying to find the words. Touch, god, owl, moon, son, daughter, Mom, Dad, brother. Sex. Ohio. The movies. Baby. Death. The things we brush up against that tell us we are living / that tell us we are also dying. The insidiousness of religion, but also the saving grace of belief or worship. It is clear that Smock worships the word and the world the word can build - a boat. When I read Barton Smock’s work I never want it to end and I always want it to end because it strikes me deep in my heart. He writes in birthplace 76 I want to have these talks. Dog parts and lost hell. My hair dead longer than yours.  These poems - a child stunned to find themselves an adult, the search for answers seems meaningless, and yet here is the word, building a ladder out of the muck. Here is the word continuing to make sense of all that has been lost. Of all that will.
-Jane Stephens Rosenthal, poet and filmmaker

To read Barton Smock is to unlock a sliver of a Midwestern surrealist's (frog-less) dream. Here, God is often in the other room, consumed by the death of childhood and the stylings of the continual family, where famine and loneliness and love all succumb to the image-driven line. To the sideways divine. Grief as a sting. Most of Smock's poems (of which, he has thousands) are often a couple dozen words. Rarely more than a paragraph. A snippet. A breath. A postcard to bury in the ground, its flowers to be shaped like ancient ghosts. Barton Smock's newest ode is his collection Wasp, Gasp, a lyrical visit through childhood handstands and Ohio backlands and lackluster devils expelling hunger in a drunk stomach discovered in someone else's coat. To tackle the line is to fine-tune the prayer-in-hiatus, the blessed text of sleep. This book is the drink. This train is the king.
-Benjamin Niespodziany, poet, author of No Farther Than The End Of The Street

I have lived in Ohio, and experienced its liminal qualities. Both an antiheaven and an antihell, it has the peculiar promise of being illegible from within and without. The narrator's body in Wasp, gasp is also illegible in this way, vibrating slowly between life, death and something else. In this space made by vibration, another something-else can emerge, in sonic play and folding images. God and dog circle one another then flop onto the ground, roll around. I know the demands of a liminal body in a place that won't hold it, what that might create. Barton Smock invites a reader to enter that zone too, the place that is a mode of being, one form of secret (or secret form) revealed: 
The more internal/ the life, the longer/ the past./ A velvet cricket.
-Jay Besemer, poet, author of Men and Sleep


Cover Image by Noah Michael Smock