privately self-published works, pay what you want:
rocks have the softest shadows, 237 pages
poems, Dec 2020
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
untouched in the capital of soon, 187 pages
poems, Sept 2021
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
blood to bathe us in its blue past, 217 pages
poems new and selected, May 2022
can be purchased via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com)
or Venmo: @Barton-Smock-2
or CashApp: $BartonSmock
*be sure to include your mailing address in the comments of the order. any questions can be directed to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
a note:
Most of my work is privately self-published via Lulu. The work I privately self-publish is designated as pay-what-you-want. I don't usually have hard copies of my work on my person...so, when one orders any of these works via my venmo/cashapp/paypal...I order the book at that point from Lulu, and send it. So, if one wants a work autographed, I order the work, send it to myself, sign it, and then send it on from there. As such, there is no print run nor stash of author copies. I don't care how anyone does what they do. I like the doing, and care for it in all of its forms. But one shouldn't misunderstand the shape, especially if they want to take it.
Two misidentified boys in a field of handstands are having a funeral for a bicycle. Their fathers aren’t dead but bring the same car horn to every town. How about that field. I am not crushed when sleep forgets how to hold me.
Director Julian Higgins navigates the difficult and earned God's Country as a map redrawn of a land scarred by permission, sacrifice, and, finally, invitation. Nothing here is god-given- not character, not spirit, not image. Thandiwe Newton is radar and blip, and never fails to locate the strayings of her lived-in living out. What a performance. If fire and flood, here, are the easier answers, then what a mercy that the last scene poses a devastating ask in a new nothingness where the local and the symbolic abandon each other equally.
I can be in the wrong room for days and not see my sons. I heard recently that the child of god and death wasn't here soon enough to live forever. Fuck. Write in pencil, like a ghost.
Had the inner and outer honor of saying something toward Erin Wilson's 'Blue'. Inclusion is the fullest art. Lovely book.
~
Praise for Blue:
Invigorating, inventive, and remarkably honest, Blue sparks from “only the suggestion of a few bones” “a strong urge to know / each magnificent unraveling spire in pure light.” These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, capturing the magnitude of a restless, relentless search for both wound and healing. These are poems born of a kind of wrought faith that, despite all the breaking, language still might bring us closer to each other, and closer to ourselves. Wilson has given us a heady, intoxicating experience, a fascinating collision of tradition and innovation, all exquisitely layered in self, art, tenderness, and a rich testament to the ever-present need for risk and empathy.
— John Sibley Williams, As One Fire Consumes Another and Skin Memory
These poems are startling and joyful at once… With such daring, Wilson illuminates a universe that hurts us to see. But she accounts for the days in Blue with such humility and restraint that it is a gift. To read this book is first to be saddened, winded, and then to be surprised by joy.
— Emily Tristan Jones, editor Columba
Erin Wilson’s Blue is a work of radical worry that brushes over the invisible fossil of location with a verse that paints sons and mothers into corners so sharply that it separates survival and existence long enough that losses grieve differently over the same portion of brevity. I loved this book. For the vague science of its radiance, for its reverse resurrections, for the timestamps its poetry puts on the disorientation of the parent and the parented, for its carrying of a sorrow that remains unpaid by sadness, and, most of all, for trying to keep with color a nothingness from going bad.
— Barton Smock, Skin To Skin In An Unmarked Life and Ghost Arson
Book is HERE
Yesterday, distance destroyed its early work.
Fog machines fell asleep.
I let my son bite me and believed
for three hours
that it was today.
You told me underwater
about the fog machines.
God looked like death. Death saw.
Blonde is wholesale maddening. Director Andrew Dominik loses the thread early, but seems to know it? And I'm not sure that's any better. It's an odd movie that would steal scenes from itself, but, here we are. While Ana de Armas almost takes the child out of childish enough to keep beauty, and Julianne Nicholson is a heat that leads bottles to lightning, nothing leaves a mark. Aside from the first 20 minutes, and one scene with Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, this movie is so much tell that the show is secondary, and no amount of body horror or spiritual indictment can survive on image alone with writing this obvious and unquiet. It might have been the point, but the experience isn't strange enough, and the relief is always in sight, no matter how much is left onscreen. Too much sabotage, not enough self.
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While keeping confession pinned beneath the unholy ripple of Tim Roth's flickering muscle of a performance, Resurrection, as guided and committedly freed by director Andrew Semans, is a film of secret chaos and bodily left turns that lovingly loses its permission to a possessed and wholly overtaken showing from Rebecca Hall. While surely mad and caringly unpredictable, it wouldn't be able to talk its tongues without the work that Grace Kaufman does as a child who moves the happening from under the accident with a waiting lonely enough to cradle the hurting young and uncarried old.
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Elegantly untouched by director Nikyatu Jusu, who knows that stories are owed their belongings, Nanny is a delayed stunner of a film that never feels behind or slow but instead, and in line with the spiritual and physical fluidity of Anna Diop's fictile performance, stops and starts in a depth that feels both timeworn and newly doomed.
kingsoftrain 