Kirjahaku

This unique study considers the exegetical and hermeneutical possibilities of analyzing the entire letter of 1 Thessalonians as letter of consolation. Abraham Smith maintains that Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians with a full knowledge of the tradition of Greco-Roman letters of consolation and chose the genre to sustain members of the Thessalonian church. Showing how Paul's letter of consolation was understood in Paul's world and by subsequent generations, Smith demonstrates the usefulness of Paul's rhetoric of comfort for modern society.The Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation series explores current trends within the discipline of biblical interpretation by dealing with the literary qualities of the Bible: the play of its language, the coherence of its final form, and the relationships between text and readers. Biblical interpreters are being challenged to take responsibility for the theological, social, and ethical implications of their readings. This series encourages original readings that breach the confines of traditional biblical criticism.

Abraham Smith's Dear Weirdo is a wayward romp that offers prismatic insight into the nature of love, loss, and home along the way. With a spellbinding immediacy, Smith rides a prophetic cadence through town, into the sky, and down the "gut's lonely road." The deeply familiar reappears-neither dust-covered nor bathed in golden light-but as a continuous explosion in this book-length poem, drawing the reader into a personal history refracted through a lyricism utterly Smith's own.

Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told through colloquialism and a minding of song. Music has a scent and the song logic as this book meanders along that broken and disjointed road. Regional writing is a curse, it seems; but this book is unabashedly regional, in the sense that Smith sought to translate the stories of his native county--and thereby the fading gleam or echo of a dying agrarian lifeway. This is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. More broadly, this is a book-length poem about culture history and masculinity and our rupturing and sometimes obliterating elisions with machines. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. Gertrude Stein said the seed of DESTRUCTION OF MAN: "After all anybody is as their land and air is."

This Guide reads the Gospel of Mark as a 1st-century CE story about Jesus, for his followers, and against tyranny or the abusive use of power. First, the book shows students how the Gospel uses the form of a traditional laudatory biography (a ‘Life’) to reshape the memory of the shame-ridden trials and suffering of Jesus. Such a biography portrayed Jesus’ descent (as a son of God), his deeds, and his heroic death, dispelling any notion that the teacher Jesus was a charlatan or huckster. Second, Smith demonstrates how the Gospel devotes a great deal of space to Jesus’ training of his disciples - as he calls, commissions, and corrects them in preparation for the difficult moments of their journey.Third, Smith highlights the Gospel’s special characterizations of Jesus - as a prophetic envoy, a man of authority, and a philosophical hero - contrasting Jesus’ use of power with the abusive use of power by Rome’s representatives (Herod Antipas and Pilate).

Willie Jackson seems to have always been a thinking kind of person, a poor person's philosopher so to speak. Some of Willie's best thoughts and the events in Willie's life are recounted by Willie's somewhat rough-hewn good friend, Tap. Follow Tap as he recollects on the everyday realities that people face in life and the many uncertainties and promises of life itself, as seen through the mindseye of Willie Jackson. Don't worry yourselves any, Willie Jackson isn't dead, he is just the type who doesn't find it easy to talk about his thoughts and philosophies with people that aren't his close friends. But Tap will do a good job of explaining Willie's innermost thoughts, just give Tap a chance. The thing that you need to understand about Tap going in, is that on his own account, Tap is not the smoothest of talkers and does not use complicated words when simpler words will work out just fine. Although he's a reasonably bright person, Tap isn't the most artful of speakers, he will sometimes use terminology and words that you aren't familiar with, so be forewarned.

"There is some sort of backwoods rustic buddha at the heart of Abraham Smith. Smith's poems exercise an almost mystical faith in the sounds of words and in the accretive spiritual and semantic energy of phonetic accidents. They are equally obsessed with accidents of human nature, and read at times like police blotters set to Bach, the cauterizing bird's-eye view at which the catalog of human folly and violence mercifully refracts into folklore. These are also prayers against extinction in which each syllable is a spell and a swim bladder. Amidst the disaster that is our future fossil record, may the stars at least remember there were also songs, and these poems were some of them." --Ashley CappsIn Abraham Smith's wild and gorgeous book, we begin with the image of a doe "hung from a backhoe," there like an opening piece of punctuation in a song about rural Wisconsin (the town of Ladysmith, I have it on authority). Weaving scraps of memory, voices heard and overheard, with precise observation of the phenomenal world, Bear Lite Inn sings beauty back into a part of the world that art and literature have largely ignored. Smith has distilled a place--its language, concerns, flora, fauna, cultures and rituals--into poems that are half art song, and half magic spell." --Mark Wunderlich

A new poetry collection from one of America's most lyric and sonically interesting poets.Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.

In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies' subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.

For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Time Earley, Surgencies responds to the sounds and movements alive in rural northern Wisconsin. In each line Abraham Smith includes an excitement in answer to frog, coyote, eagle, barn swallow. Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith's eye is fast, but his ink is faster. In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left-hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast. Surgencies, Abraham Smith's latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that "kicked skulls roll funny." Prepare to get honey-skulled.