INCLUDES FLEXI DISC OF SMITH READING WITH ACCORDION (Emily Ondine Wittman) & DRUM (Craig Pickering) ACCOMPANIMENT. PLUS PHOTOS TAKEN BY THE POET OF THE FARM HE WORKS AT THAT INSPIRED THE BOOK.

Abraham Smiths Destruction of Man is a compass setting toward musics caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of river.Tyehimba Jess, Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didnt work: this wont either: yet Destruction of Man is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar countystung body; stung landas told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate whats left, and the hawk ate whats left, and then the hawk died of old age. This is a book-length poem about small-scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrude Stein: After all anybody is as their land and air is.

Ive been unable to decide if the best way to describe this book is as punk gone agrarian or if the agrarians went punk. Juliana Spahr, Winner of the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize

Part song, part guttural wail into the American rural landscape, Destruction of Man is a breathtaking lyric thats as complex and heartbreaking as the country itself. Ada Limn, finalist 2015 National Book Award-Poetry

Abraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head. Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By Truckers

Author:

Abraham Smith

Abraham Smith is the author of four poetry collections: Ashagalomancy (Action Books, 2015); Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (Action Books, 2014); Hank (Action Books, 2010); and Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007). In 2015, he released Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), a co-edited anthology of contemporary rural American poetry and related essays. His creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. DESTRUCTION OF MAN is his book-length poem about farming (Third Man Books, 2018). Smith is an Assistant Professor of English at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.