Declarations of Hunger, By Reed Smith

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Declarations of Hunger
by Reed Smith

Pub Date: March 15, 2025
Poetry, 72 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-936767-60-1

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“How can a thing glint even as it’s still? Ask Reed Smith. He speaks the dying language of morning light, rivers, burlap shadows, and coyotes’ “early barks […] slapping flatwater,” inspects all our dust and rot and manages yet to marvel. Reading Declarations of Hunger felt like slipping along in a secret canoe, deep in a landscape of grief and tenderness, where the marsh hawk stares back and “truth always makes a curve.” I think we can trust this voice—its intimacy as much as its restraint. Smith’s poems get good and close, enough to hear the rasp of snake scales and to be honest about what a man sees in the mirror. To warn us about fingers in the hourglass. To test every door.”

-Allison Adair, author of The Clearing

“Smith reminds us that until we can divest from our massy entailments, our dis-eased and “loculated bodies” persist with their sad animal hunger, drawing sustenance from the nitrate- and blood-soaked earth. America remains mostly fields—even as we marginalize them in our digitally obsessed cultural imaginary—ravaged by weather and industry, where “Fermented / in Disneyworld bacteria, embryos fasciculate / in polluted foam.” These poems combat the trivialization of our food’s origins and the fates of our waste, knowing the earth is a record of our devastations, yet our hope for survival.”

Joe Fletcher, author of The Hatch

“Some poetry slows time to a crawl, the intonation of an image or phrase a kind of musculature developing right before your very eyes. You can sense the perspiration, the struggle of becoming, each breath thickening the air. “Drink its water / and the universe expands invisibly / inside you.” Spirit is a thing we make unto ourselves, and Declarations of Hunger is full of spirit. The world teeters on its fulcrum and Smith takes note, a kind of bravery in witness. This man’s heart hits you like an ambush.”

-Joe Pan, author of Florida Palms

photo by Jessica Lopez

Author statement: “The poems in Declarations of Hunger came out of a desire to return where I was born and grew up. I read recently that many debut books of poems are steeped in an author’s home, and mine is no different. Throughout the book are the self-similar fractals of the natural world built upon one another—the fields rising to the leaves that push into the clouds mirroring the creeks and hills of the farmland and river bottoms I spent so much time in. If memory is hunger, there is starvation in every corner of the mind for what we remember we had. The poems of this book live inside that hunger to recollect and repossess. They scour a void I never want to fill, polishing the burnt memories of childhood, of family, of fear and of wonder.”

Reed Smith was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1978. He graduated from The University of Texas and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has lived in many parts of the country, and has been a paramedic, a teacher, a geriatric advance care practitioner, and an actor who performed at The Globe, Orange Tree, and Swan Theatres in England. He lives in Hollywood, Florida, with his wife and twin daughters. This is his debut book of poems.

Interview with The Sapling:

SAPLING: Tell us about the process of getting your collection out in the world. Did you enter contests? Open reading periods? What transpired between sending the manuscript out initially and its acceptance at BAP?

REED SMITH: This collection took an extraordinarily circuitous route to get published. When I graduated from Iowa in 2002, I assumed I would do what a number of my peers were doing: write, teach, publish, win a book prize, and so on. It seemed so easy! Despite my best efforts, I really only ended up doing the first of those things. I had the crafting/writing/editing part down, but getting my first book published eluded me for over twenty years. Occasionally I’d get a poem up online somewhere, but it was pretty far and wide between publications. Life took me all over the place. I started one career, then another. I moved to five different states before settling down. I got married, and had twin daughters. It almost seemed like I’d be a writer forever, just not one with a book to show for it…

(Read more here)

 

Reed Smith is available for Zoom appearances in those classrooms teaching his book. Teacher discounts for paperback and ebook copies of Declarations of Hunger are available by contacting Brooklyn Arts Press directly at info@brooklynartspress.com.