Barnes&Noble.com
Smith has a way with words—to inform, inspire, and push us to know the world and ourselves better. The poetry in Above Ground does all that.”
The Millions
Smith’s pivots and pacing mirror the routes of our lives, and his gentle, attentive poems are downright sacramental.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
This book is an illumination I sorely needed of both the outdoors and the quotidian—a joyful embrace and legacy of bright language and poignant questions.”
From the Publisher
Clint Smith’s poems make palpable the soap-bubble thinness of borders—the contingent boundaries of love and loss, past and present, sanctuary and violence, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ With inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom, he shows us the linkages that both bind and divide us—as family, as community, as nation, as world: ‘The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.’ I am so grateful for these luminous poems.
—Monica Youn, author of Blackacre
Elle
A poetry collection intimately parsing parenthood, legacy, and lineage.”
author of Inciting Joy Ross Gay
I think there is an emergent theory, and maybe also a demand, when Clint Smith considers the brutalizing facts and language of war almost alongside a reverie about sprinkling sand on his baby’s feet; when he mourns the long and brutal and ongoing history of American slavery almost alongside making French toast with the kids or dancing until the whole family falls down. When he makes us witness the most incomprehensibly awful (and daily) brutalities not only beside but almost in tandem with the most incomprehensibly tender (and daily) actions of care. It’s a theory, and a demand, to which I think we must pay very close attention.
author of World of Wonders Aimee Nezhukumatathil
This book is an illumination I sorely needed of both the outdoors and the quotidian—a joyful embrace and legacy of bright language and poignant questions.”
