Down by Erin Elizabeth Smith

Erin Elizabeth Smith’s new book Down weaves the speaker’s life with landscape and story, specifically that of Alice in Wonderland. As the speaker navigates the abrupt end of a marriage and the rebuilding of a life, she takes use through town after town in her search for her new self. The poems connect to the natural world around the speaker, and to a variety of other characters, to food, and to recovery. The books show us Down, but also show a path up. Buy here.

From “On the Third Month of Separation”

In the South, sometimes heat / is the closest thing to love. / The days reduced to wet air / and fearless waterbeds. In this new / absence called separation, / I have become night-bound / with phoned voices and three-dollar / chardonnay. The first day, / I drink myself to blindness, . . .

From “Alice Ponders Knoxville”

Sometimes the other side / of the glass is nothing / but Tennessee, redbuds / opening like viscera / against her interstates. / I watch the hostas / shoot their egret heads / from the green . . .

From “February in Knoxville”

. . . February, and there’s no more snow, / just the showy wind making everything / crackle. Still, the city blinks in blue / and white, its people wrapped / like crunchy gifts. I breathe / into cupped palms, walk the streets / that turn into others, and watch / as the sun kicks light / off our city’s strangest sphere. // We cannot choose where we love— . . .