“Bruce Smith makes poetry from not-poetry, art from not-art, in these savage songs where history clashes with ecstasy.”
HUNGRY GHOST
by Bruce Smith
“No tear gas in the writer, no tear gas in the reader,” writes Bruce Smith. One of America’s most lauded poets, Smith in his new collection plants one depth-charge after another as the poet offers a language capable of conveying the radical underpinnings of our uncertain times. In Buddhist cosmology, hungry ghosts are beings whose appetites can never be satisfied. In Smith’s poems we encounter a vision of a nation composed of individuals always longing for more: “I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss.” From Whitman and Dickinson to Rihanna and George Floyd, themes of societal and personal chaos lead to sudden moments of clarity. These haunting meditations, of ruptured narratives and bruised bodies, celebrate resilience, and call for transformation of both self and society. To read Smith is to be tempered, enlivened, moved and inspired.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER UNTIL OCTOBER 23, 2025.
If you preorder now, books may arrive a few weeks before the date above.
Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith is the author of seven books of poems, The Common Wages, Silver and Information, Mercy Seat, The Other Lover, Songs for Two Voices, Devotions, and Spill. He is a recipient of the 2012 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his books have been named as finalists for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Award. He lives in Syracuse, NY.
“The secret should be finally out – that his ‘heartbeat is set to the work of eternity’, that he is, and for a long time has been, one of our finest poets.”
—Agha Shahid Ali
“Like no other modern American poet, he captures into language a flavor like that of jazz.”
—Denis Johnson
“Bruce Smith is a poet I always read with awe and hunger.”
—Terrance Hayes
