Among Others

Anyone touched by grief can find a resolution in these poems. Bridging narrative fiction and a year of ekphrastic poems, all new in 2015, Smith offers Among Others as an exploration of relationships, and a celebration of the upside of the human spirit living with grace. These are far from dark poems: they expose the tentative and impermanent, but celebrate persistence in the face of tragedy. From an absent brother afflicted with PTSD after Vietnam, his sister (an artist) who brings to the canvas trauma of her own, an unstable mother who succumbs to complicated bereavement, and a father who hangs himself - over the drowning of the youngest sibling one winter-the author's own annotations belie the self-referential nature of resilient creative process in this poetry much of which is based in the visual context never seen by the reader.