Lytton Smith

The Square is the winner of the 2020 New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest and the newest collection by Lytton Smith, author of The All-Purpose Magical Tent and While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It."Lytton Smith reaches in these poems for the deepest collective meanings of the square as shape and place where history changes-and then changes again. These profound poems capture the after and the after and the after of human history as it has played out upon squares all over the world. In the transfixing convergence of forms and histories that surface in these astounding poems, Smith has created an urgent, stirring poetics of the square and its role in social movements all over the world." -Idra Novey

With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives.

How do we react to disaster, to political uprising, to spectacle? With relief missions, donations, and what words? While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It, the second book by Lytton Smith, explores the relationship between poetry, news, and the lives of others. Poised between Brecht's critique of empathy and Martha Nussbaum's politics of compassion, this powerful collection plays with direct address and personal testimony as it investigates the relationship between ethics and the aesthetic. Drawing on sources that range from travel guides, BBC reports, contemporary art exhibitions, and sixteenth-century debates about masque, Smith's book offers a range of forms that test the edges of the page, the borders of communication.

A masterful debut collection by poet Lytton Smith, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize.