Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except
it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call
his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a
tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF
MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told
through colloquialism and a minding of song. Music has a scent and the
song logic as this book meanders along that broken and disjointed road.
Regional writing is a curse, it seems; but this book is unabashedly
regional, in the sense that Smith sought to translate the stories of his
native county--and thereby the fading gleam or echo of a dying agrarian
lifeway. This is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in
the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. More broadly,
this is a book-length poem about culture history and masculinity and our
rupturing and sometimes obliterating elisions with machines. The
conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we
have is love. Gertrude Stein said the seed of DESTRUCTION OF MAN: After
all anybody is as their land and air is.