Bear Lite Inn

"There is some sort of backwoods rustic buddha at the heart of Abraham Smith. Smith's poems exercise an almost mystical faith in the sounds of words and in the accretive spiritual and semantic energy of phonetic accidents. They are equally obsessed with accidents of human nature, and read at times like police blotters set to Bach, the cauterizing bird's-eye view at which the catalog of human folly and violence mercifully refracts into folklore. These are also prayers against extinction in w...