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I’ve been a fan of Barton Smock’s for a long time. I don’t remember how I stumbled across his work, but I feel like I’ve been reading him for years. He’s been self-publishing his books for as long as I’ve read him, though I know he had at least one collection, Ghost Arson (2018) published by Kung Fu Treachery Press. His Goodreads profile lists 30 separate titles, which makes him one of the most, if not the most, prolific and maybe one of the most talented poets above the dirt to come out of the United States in the 21st Century.
Many poets — too many — get bogged down in the need to say something specific, to proclaim or to decry the age. Some of them do this very well; but the majority of them do so at the expense of ignoring those moments which demonstrate the operation of the cardiac combustion and bioelectric systems moving our collective consciousness forward. Smock takes each moment, each nerve ending, and dissects around it and through it, down to the root.
To call his work surreal dismisses some of the pure language poetry in his latest book. To label it simply language poetry would be to ignore the thread of sinew and bone and the fundamental tangibility of the work: “I break my nose in front of a deer beneath a star made of ticks.” (“Our Mothers Poke Holes in Things that Don’t Breathe”). Each poem is a dream within a dream within an anesthetic-free exploratory surgery of the human experience. The poems on these blissfully unnumbered pages unfold with a precision that in cinema would occupy the space left for high art body horror. And because the pages are unnumbered, the reader can dig in anywhere without any obligation to read in a specific order, and find themselves in a different middle of a well planned and detailed poetic journey.
– Mick Parsons
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