Spending the Light: Poems 1955-2003

“Spiritual kin to Gertude Stein, Tom Smith exalts in inspired wordplay, running the gamut from sublime nonsense to the most surprising sorts of common sense, so deftly that it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which. He is a virtuoso of the ruggedly original.”
—Harry Smith
publishing, poet, essayist (Pulpsmith, The Sexy Sixties)

“In Spending the Light we are given…the distilled wisdom and wit and experience of a lifetime, with more than half a century of it devoted to creating memorable an...