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For readers of C.D. Wright, Natalie Diaz, and Tim 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.
Abraham Smith weaves whimsy with his words. This is a magical collection filled with lines that echo long after they're read. —Courtney Marie Andrews, American Singer-Songwriter
Reading Abraham Smith's Surgencies one is unmoored and swept away in the poetic river, serenaded by the tetradactyl calls of cranes and frogs. Brief eddies give way to a surge of words that goes on and on through memory and song. And like John Muir once said, "We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it." —Adrian Kien, The Caress Is a Letter of Instruction
Reading Surgencies aloud produces wonderful rumblings in the chest. It makes me think of Tibetan throat singing, and the didgeridoo, and big trains in the night. The Abraham Smith effect is vocamotive. And its spell will reach you. —Michael Earl Craig, Iggy Horse
Further praise for Abraham Smith:
Abraham Smith's [poetry] 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
I’ve been unable to decide if the best way to describe [Smith] 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, [Smith's poetry] is a breathtaking lyric that’s as complex and heartbreaking as the country itself. — Ada Limón, twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States of America
Abraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head. — Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By Truckers
For over a decade, Abraham Smith has been pouring out into the night of American poetry a brilliantly made, variegated song. Smith’s jangling, brainy, tonically surprising and lyrically cornucopic work is undoubtedly influential but ultimately inimitable . . . Smith confects an entire mythic system, singing into existence a universe made of the ruins of the last one, whatever’s lying around the yard. — Johannes Goransson, The New Quarantine