Be recorder Poems

Few books of poetry are as acutely attuned to the present moment as the most recent title from the prolific Giménez Smith. This collection centers around the extended titular section which stitches together myriad reflections on a country divided, perhaps more than ever, by race, language, and class. In deeply personal, unquestionably political verses, Giménez Smith proves to be a master of tight concision and unexpected turns of phrase, as when a speaker invokes epigenetics, inherited trauma, and ethnoracial legacies in America by confronting the battle older than me in my helix. Amid long passages lamenting the current state of affairs, a speaker excoriates executive branch-corporate shills / and the patriarchal misogynist statesmen / and the Tiki torch-khakis boys, an obvious indictment of today's racist politicians and their followers. To put a finer point on the issue, this daughter of Peruvian and Argentinian immigrants asks, why am I the locus of your discontent / and not your president. Bold and unapologetic, this collection is everything poetry needs to be in our age of hateful, anti-intellectual race-baiting: deeply thoughtful, urgently provocative, and endlessly imaginative.--Diego Báez Copyright 2010 Booklist

An autobiographical speaker (a mother and first-generation American) catalogues the flotsam and jetsam of late-stage capitalism in the stunning sixth collection from Smith (Milk and Filth). With a prophetic voice rooted in awareness of a dying planet, 20 poems and a middle lyric sequence are impressively served by Smith's ear for pithy encapsulation: "why am I the locus of your discontent/ and not your president." Smith's speakers frequently turn to dark humor: "you can shape/ my toil into a robot with nearly real skin,/ but you can't touch the feeble efforts I make to retaliate;" "should I mother or write/ serve art or the state." Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Smith's writing is its refusal to downplay the speaker's complicity in a Darwinian system of profit, in which shopping at Amazon equates to "baring my economic thorax." The lyrical prose piece "Ars Poetica" turns ambivalence over the purchase of a video game into a meditation on impersonal cosmic forces, ending in a dystopian, speculative chronicle in which an airplane is described by future humanity as "a ship powered by bones that flew in the air without moving a single feather." Smith's image-driven metaphors circle the "molten core of the real," articulating shared dilemmas while jolting the reader out of complacence. (Aug.)