Kirjahaku

"Mind-blowing... This isn't Smith's first tale of toxic and nihilistic obsession, but it is his most ravishing, painfully funny, and wildly mythic." -- Booklist (starred review) "Smith is not only a spectacular stylist but also a visionary." --Washington Post Book World From Charlie Smith (Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Chimney Rock, Shine Hawk), author of three New York Times Notable Books and a literary stylist whose "writing can make the mountains ring" (New York Times Book Review), comes his first novel in more than a decade, Three Delays, which follows the troubled lives of two lovers as they combat their passions and each other. In the words of James Dickey, "Writers after Charlie Smith will have to take him into account, but I doubt if any will equal or surpass him."

From Charlie Smith, critically acclaimed poet and author of Three Delays, comes a thrilling, moving, and sun-dappled noir Cotland Sims, a gangster from Miami, must come home to Key West because his mother's house has fallen off its stilts. For a long time, maybe since always, he's been estranged from his distant, combative mother, who is only now, in her old age, beginning to soften, starting to circle back to Cot, the son she had disowned. Motivated by the chance to help his mother (along with collateral financial gain), Cot decides to snatch a trove of emeralds that his boss back in Miami, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, kept hidden on a small island. And that's when the trouble starts. Cot has 48 hours to return the emeralds before he and his family--his younger, slow-minded brother; his life-long, pseudo-girlfriend; his wise, wary mother--are all killed.This tropical thriller becomes a dark fight for survival and a struggle for existential sustenance. By the end, there are heart-breaking deaths, maddening betrayals, and enough shots fired to fill a pool with bullets.

A sweeping, eerily resonant epic of race and violence in the Jim Crow South: a lyrical and emotionally devastating masterpiece from Charlie Smith, whom the New York Public Library has said "may be America's most bewitching stylist alive."Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written word, and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them near daily, and after a series of devastating events--a lynching, a church burning--Delvin fears being accused of murdering a local white boy and leaves town.Haunted by his mother's disappearance, Delvin rides the rails, meets fellow travelers, falls in love, and sees an America sliding into the Great Depression. But before his hopes for life and love can be realized, he and a group of other young men are falsely charged with the rape of two white women, and shackled to a system of enslavement masquerading as justice. As he is pushed deeper into the darkness of imprisonment, his resolve to escape burns only more brightly, until in a last spasm of flight, in a white heat of terror, he is called to choose his fate.In language both intimate and lyrical, novelist and poet Charlie Smith conjures a fresh and complex portrait of the South of the 1920s and '30s in all its brutal humanity--and the astonishing endurance of one battered young man, his consciousness "an accumulation of breached and disordered living . . . hopes packed hard into sprung joints," who lives past and through it all.

Lions and Lambs is a short poetry anthology comprising of poems based on love and death and everything in between. Taking you from tears to laughter with the turn of a page.

Taking as his starting point such wide-ranging subjects as comic books, politics, romantic love, geology, newspapers, totalitarianism, the natural world, the classics, Paris, Miami Beach, and war, Charlie Smith has written freshly realized poems in which compassion and tough mindedness touch the deep core of our humanness. From “Abuses in the Big Hotels”The old man they watched six years straight do nothingyetdied between shifts. He left a bloody shirt once, inTenerife,and never went back for it. “I loved,” the dictator says,“the way my mother’s body moved when she strolledalongholding herself in her arms. I have always lovedthe elegant sway, the curve like infinity’s cul de sac,the seductive and unappeasable ...” and stops talking.

Selecting from among Charlie Smith’s seven previous collections and including more than forty astonishing new poems, Jump Soul represents work from the career of a poet who “writes with a scalding aortal brilliance that leaves the reader drunk on dream” (New York Times Book Review). From the lush Southern landscapes of Red Roads (1987) and the haunted longing of Heroin (2000) to the bold eroticism of Women of America (2004) and, most recently, the fresh and exuberant Word Comix (2009), Smith reminds us “that we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief” (David Kirby, New York Times). Beauty in Smith’s poetry is mixed with harrowing darkness; it is “the rescued returned to the floods / and fruit pickers, those who catch beauty / aflight on the sweet-smelling breeze, authentic characters / messed up, dead on the floor / of western motels, crapped out jinxed, lost / to the boulevards.” Smith is a poet of “shimmering energy” (Mary Oliver). His work, brutal in its honesty and stunning in its lyricism, is represented in all of its extraordinary range in this new collection. From “Collected First Lines” I’m sure there is meaning, and I know it’s sometimes more interesting to stand in a road than to move along it, though even this, said with such confidence just a minute ago, explains nothing.

Poems reflect the poet's exploration of love, grief, nature, his childhood, and his dreams.

As both a poet and novelist, Charlie Smith has been hailed as one of the most original voices on the literary scene today. The New York Times calls him "prodigiously talented" and Madison Smartt Bell describes him as "not only a spectacular stylist but also a visionary." He is the author of four novels, a book of novellas, and two previous volumes of poetry, Red Roads and Indistinguishable from the Darkness. In images both stark and voluptuous, Charlie Smith writes in The Palms of a world that is sometimes brutal, violent, and chaotic. His mythmaking imagination, Stanley Kunitz says, is "the art of the born storyteller...in love with language and places, heart's mysteries, and the invitation of roads." He follows where the imagination leads, whether it be driving a rental car east on Sunset Boulevard or "stepping into Nebraska / as one would step onto a white ferry." In his willingness to stand looking until he sees, he draws us into the urgency and glory of American life.

Before and After, his fourth volume, is his most powerful collection to date—with poems so short and direct they hit home like a knife to the heart. In Before and After, Smith effectively captures the intimate life of one family—in all its courage, deceit, misery, madness, love, revelation, and rage—and transforms it to record the life of the American family.

In these haunting poems by one of this country's most gifted poets, heroin becomes a metaphor for desire as the speaker recalls his past addiction and lost loves.

Women of America is an affecting meditation on the mysteries of what drives the heart by one of America's most distinguished poets. Charlie Smith draws the poems in this volume from the tussle and cry of love, in remembrance of love's journey from fantasy to fact and back again, and in anticipation of loving the way we were meant to.

Taking as his starting point such wide-ranging subjects as comic books, politics, romantic love, geology, newspapers, totalitarianism, the natural world, the classics, Paris, Miami Beach, and war, Charlie Smith has written freshly realized poems in which compassion and tough-mindedness gesture toward wisdom.

Moving through shades of darkness and light, Charlie Smith captures a refracted view of a disturbed, disintegrating world. Demo explores landscapes both natural and urban, probing the spaces where the two overlap. Its narrator is at once wanderer and witness, living among streets where flowers are covered with dust and smells of Mexican food and Chinese cooking fill the air. The poet finds a resurgence of life in the ruins, reminding us once again “that we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief” (The New York Times). In Demo, Smith conveys a kinetic expression of hope that transcends human vagaries and machinations.