Stop Lying: Poems

by Aaron Smith

Overview

Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of the poet’s mother and how Smith, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. How does one grieve when a relationship will forever remain unresolved? What does it mean to both regret and not regret one’s decisions? What if survival doesn’t look like what we’re told it should? This is the story of a poet pushing through present-day grief and the shame of the past to find the buried truths, the ones that are hardest to tell. AFTERLIFE Sometimes the hardest part is wondering if my mother died believing I would go to hell

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822989837
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	598 KB

About the Author

Aaron Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Primer, Appetite, and Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Ploughshares and Best American Poetry. A three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, he is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mass Cultural Council. He is associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

AFTERLIFE 

 

Sometimes 

the hardest part 

 

is wondering  

if my mother died 

 

believing  

I would go 

 

to hell 

Table of Contents

Contents At Home Outlaw Freedom Isn’t Free The Only Thing After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch Pray the Gay Away Outside the Lines Something Had to Make Them That Way Fuck off, Sharon A Private Education My Father Gets in My Face More to the Story Blast Stone Jesus Maybe My Mother Had So Much Stuff Because She Was Lonely My Father Was Frank O’Hara Mom in Casket I Picked Out What Is That Song You Sing for the Dead? April, 1986 Truth First Word Stop Lying A Lonely Heart Is Ruthless God Is Not Mocked Reprobate I Never Went Back He Lied My 1990s Nothing Changed For God Hath Not Given Us the Spirit of Fear I Get Lonely Stupid Beauty Untitled Plathoholic: A Party Game Revision How to Describe What It Felt Like twentysomething A Friend Says You Can Promise the Dying Anything Last Ocean Literal Three Months Before She Died We Went to Dollywood The World of Men I’m Glad We Don’t Know When We Know My Mother Will Never Wake up Again Billy My Father Asks Me for a Buzz Cut Afterlife What If Tonight Is the Night You Figure Out the Math Equation Happy Ending Last Word Some Days Everything I Do I Do My Father’s Father Most People Live in Ugly Houses I’m Not Making This Up Family Text Letter to My Sister Holiday Fourteen Mondays Anniversary Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2023

“I’m tired of trying to be/ a good person,” Smith writes in his visceral, tender, and compassionate latest (after The Book of Daniel). Smith’s elegiac writing reveals a fervent desire to test the limits of one’s empathy and understanding, resisting the urge “to rewrite// the world to suit them.” Instead, these poems reveal the work attempting to see and describe the world as it really is, balancing a tightrope of complexity and compassion. “Maybe I’m defending him,” Smith declares in a poem about his father, “If he’s a bad man, it’s because/ he’s a broken man.” Smith’s titles are frequently as stirring as the poems themselves, such as “Maybe My Mother Had So Much Stuff Because She Was Lonely,” “A Friend Says You Can Promise the Dying Anything,” and “After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch.” This is a master class on how to write about loss and love. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Aaron Smith’s fifth collection is a beautiful slow dance between humor and despair that the whole school gathers around to watch. Smith excavates tenderness as familial memories are revisited, revised, and rendered new. Stop Lying centers the illness and death of the poet’s mother and manages to perfect that odd and ancient kinship between grief, desire, humor, and loss. The voice in these poems pulls you in close by the collar and refuses to let you go.” —sam sax, author of Bury It

“At the center of these poems is the death of the poet’s mother as he confronts his fundamentalist Christian childhood. With unflinching honesty, Aaron Smith flips the narrative of queer acceptance, implicating himself in his family’s contract of lies in which his identity as a gay man was barely discussed and mostly lied about. What is survival left unsaid? Writing at the blistering edge, Smith asks all of us, by asking himself, to stop lying.” —Miguel Murphy, author of Shoreditch

Previous Praise for Aaron Smith:

“Smith poems expound a complicated and distinctly queer relationship to beauty.” —The New Yorker
 
 “A frighteningly gifted and complex poet.” —Booklist 
 

From the Publisher