Declarations of Hunger, By Reed Smith
by Reed Smith
Pub Date: March 15, 2025
Poetry, 72 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-936767-60-1
“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
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.”
photo by Jessica Lopez
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.
TK
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.
