Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, most recently Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the L.A. Times Book Award, and the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize.
Nature's (Human) Nature
May/June 2018
Garden
I walked in the romantic garden and I walked in the garden of ruin. I walked in the green-skinned, black-skinned garden of Osiris who was ripped to pieces and reformed […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
Beautiful Throat
Beheadings, slaughter of the innocents, suffering and sorrow say all the stabbed, ecstatic art of the museums and more of the samesays the news, the glowing, after glowing now what, […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
Ballad and Proposition
after Alice Oswald Take away my engine and I shall engineless goto find you. Take away my bees and I will flowerless walk the vectors of sweet nothings until […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
Ferment
I saw the body of the jack fruit fall. I saw the body of the herofall, his armor clanging on his body. Then the juice and sutrasof the little spell […]
Poetry
Nov/Dec 2017
Garden
I walked in the romantic garden and I walkedin the garden of ruin. I walked in the green-skinned,black-skinned garden of Osiris who was ripped to pieces and reformed and adored. […]
February Sky
“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands awayfrom her throat—the way she liked […]
Poetry
Spring 2009
Devotion: Rent
I’d like the mannerists and the brutalists better if they began their ventures, rent due. I’d like the ironists and the sincere better too. And the white people and the […]
Poetry
Summer 1998
Drivin’ and Cryin’
for Megan The dogs stop their bark and listen. The thirsty man stops and the man in his wheel stops and the man stops pushing his stone and listens, and […]
Poetry
Summer 1998
February Sky
“endlessly making an end to things” —Celan I must have left a fingerprint, a molecule of oil, a seal, a slick when I took my hands awayfrom her throat—the way she liked […]