the work, the word, said saying

All my self-published collections are pay what you want. Be sure to include your mailing address and publication you want in the comments of the order. To request a PDF copy for review, or for purchase, or to request earlier works not listed, message me directly over social media or email me at bartonsmock@yahoo.com

can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp $BartonSmock
or Zelle bartonsmock@yahoo.com

Listing of works from 2019 to current:

Animal Masks On the Floor of the Ocean, 124 pages
poems, June 2019

MOTHERLINGS, 52 pages
poems, June 2019

an old idea one had of stars, 58 pages
poems, February 2020

rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages
poems, Dec 2020

untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021

blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022

apartures, 125 pages
poems, January 2023

deer as permission to die in ohio, 43 poems
chapbook, April 2023

naked in dog years, 55 pages
poems, April 2024

57 Letters to Ethan Hawke or I wanted to stop saying god
August 2024

The Crow's Book of Wrists, 193 pages
poems, August 2024

angel tantrum, 171 pages
poems, April 2025

some praise, over time, etc::

The work of Barton Smock, a prolific mid-western poet, modifies the meaning of Christian Wiman’s idea in that it seeks unceasingly for the spaces between those ‘annihilative silence[s]’ that would pursue us, and for the watchful reader opens some door into human experience in a way that is at once intensely personal and detached. Through the manipulation of both common and cerebral language Smock’s poems maintain a dance between the familiar and the unspeakable. They act as a shout to the silences that curl up in experience- offering some view from the inside of that experience, but never in an expected way.

…The themes of family, abuse, poverty, and alienation figure heavily in the book, but to call this confessional poetry seems a bit out of keeping with what is traditionally considered confessional. He speaks of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers while also utilizing the first person, but the reader can never be exactly sure who these characters are. They are changeable, and often engaging in nearly surreal activity that might confuse more than enlighten. The key seems to be finding some language to quantify suffering, or some way of qualifying experience out of context - which at moments brings it ever more sharply into sight…

…Smock has found a way to speak for those who don’t perhaps know that they have something important to say; to share. The marginalized child, the grieving mother, the ailing child or sibling- they will all find a voice here, and though it might not be the way they would voice the affliction that rests within them, they are sure to recognize their faces. Whether this is a burden or a blessing remains a judgment to be formed by the individual reader, but I find the poetry...to be full of the intensity of experience in a way that I can’t help but identify and empathize. Something preserved so as not to be forgotten, and perhaps repeated.

~Emma Hall, poet, editor of Figment

~

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...

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. 

~Kazim Ali, poet, author of Inquisition (2018, Wesleyan), Sukun (2023, Wesleyan) and many others

~

Experiencing Barton Smock’s poetry is similar to living in a foreign country long enough to begin to understand the language.

Smock’s language is always intriguing, often foreign, more often brilliant in its ability to put images and concepts in the reader’s unsuspecting mind.

Certain poems/passages all but announce their meanings, as this from Gameshow Fatalities:

“see one of my children worrying less about suicide
and more about where it should happen. see: tub. see: easier
for a mother to clean.”

And some slide an idea into your consciousness such as this from Untitled:

“eternity
is a doll
reading
a menu, memorizing
a license plate
and doll
the first
eating disorder
in space”

Smock can shock, as well. Here, from Gestural Transportation, this standout stanza:

“the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a
starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his
home in a delirium brought on by a toothache. also,
Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s
mother.”

The ethereal makes an appearance in the poem, Snow:

“say even god / would leave / this church
to step on the bones of a star”

Smock uses familiar subjects in much of his poetry: parents, siblings, children, but they are traveling in places that always surprise and make the reader stretch; it is a stretch most worthy of the effort.
To read these poems is a journey into a new art, and a privilege for the reader.

-Dd Spungin, poet

~

It seems to me that a lot of modern poetry is not poetry, but simply non-fiction with line breaks, so it’s refreshing to read modern poetry from an actual poet. As he first demonstrated with infant*cinema, Smock is conscious of language, of the power of a few words, or few words, and his mostly minimalist poems have the ability to evoke endless dreamscapes. The infinite from the finite, another paradox from paradoxical poems, poems that are like alternate or anti-paracosms. For example, here is one titled “Mooon.”

moan, fossil. how do my feet look in my mother’s belly?
my heart is a pink flame / is my father’s / fingernail.
father calls me antler. I don’t know this yet. I will be
shot
by many hands.

By simply including an extra ‘o’ in the word ‘moon,’ elongating what Sir Richard Burton called the “corpse upon the road of night,” Smock conjures a wolf’s howl, a cow’s lament, creatures of childhood’s imagination and myth. And then we are given the juxtaposition, the amalgamation of vestigial past and fetal future and beyond, to the (moon) shot of doctors? adulators? murderers? An unborn heart metamorphosing from flame to fingernail, or existing as both simultaneously, like Schrödinger’s cat, until postnatal wave collapse. The phrase “father calls me antler” tells a story in and of itself, a mysterious nickname/endearment/joke/snide….

Considering Ghost Arson as a collection, there are obsessions or at least repetitions: owls, milk, ghosts, etc. The pinnacle obsession being god in all forms and personalities (“you picture god as a toddler studying a map” or “the airway of a god with a tail”), the word itself repeated nearly to the point of semantic satiation, a term coined by Leon Jakobovits James, who also suggested that the phenomenon could be employed to ameliorate phobias. Consciously or not, perhaps Smock is attempting to exorcise a theophobia. Conversely, the recurrence could be a mantra reverberating across poems.
Some of my favorite images include:

“step on the bones of a star”
“a snake made of milk”
“ear-shaped mirrors”
“spacesuits for stillborns”
“the owl with hands”

Surreal and soft-spoken, to enjoy Smock’s work one must learn to take pleasure in balancing on the fringe of the unknown and admiring the abyssal veil that stretches before you with scintillations that echo fallen stars. Read him and dream.

-George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below

~

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, poet, from Cruel Garters

~

Reading these poems is like assembling a kaleidoscope in a dim room and each jewel that finds its place lights up a glimpse of a spectacular depth. This collection of words is brilliantly surreal. Unlike much writing that's brilliant and surreal, these pieces hold their contents with tenderness. After a while, the love shines through as more important than any sense one might make of lesser things.

- Kyla Houbolt, poet, author of Surviving Death

~

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

~

This is powerful stuff, ripped from place of dream and nightmare, love and song, a deeply personal voice is given form here. 

- Jon Cone, poet, author of New Year Begun  

~

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 

~

Smock leverages paradoxes, non-sequiturs, and wordplay to pulse out euphonious theophanies. With each succeeding poem, he intones nightmares and dreams the reader awake.

- George Salis, author of Sea Above, Sun Below

~

Barton Smock knows something that time also knows, continuing & carving out his own path within a rich tradition of surrealist-absurdist poets blazing a poetic path seemingly out of thin air. Smock’s poetic is filled with a stark heart & curiosity which leans on the unknown as much, or more, as on the known. This is the voice of a seer. The voice implores, becomes plural, rages & laughs & cries & asks. At times, a lost & reluctant prophet who heeds that "some places exist only after you reach them twice." Smock sees the deepness within himself, and perhaps, within all living beings in unison. And this may be one of my favorite gifts of Wasp, gasp—the poet’s way of approaching himself & this very existence with the same amount of integrity, imagination & nervous wonder. Wasp, gasp is a poetry of astoundment which I can foresee standing the test of time simultaneously with Al-Khazneh, Machu Picchu & Stone Henge alike.

- Daniel Cyran, poet, curator and editor of Anvil Tongue

~

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