Ashagalomancy
by Abraham Smith

Poetry.
ISBN: 9780989804882
Release Date: November 2015
$16

“if anything i will go against the heart
as a drowned ear as a third dais to
venerate caw caw if anything the heart
is a campfire it tends to take a skill to tending
tho there is this beginner’s luck
about how this and that lean
you can’t just throw it all on there
why not that broken shovel handle too”

“There’s an ease in his work because of this; it is wayward and yet present, halting and then flowing out into space. There’s no one alive writing like Smith, and maybe only Frank Stanford was the closest literary kin….”

— James Wagner, Mobile Reviews

“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. In this his fourth book, 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. Ashagalomancy shows us the poet at the height of his powers, a poet of reach, tenderness, ambition, a gimlet eye and a vatic voice.”

— Johannes Göransson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abraham Smith hails from Ladysmith, Wisconsin. His poetry collections — via Action Books — are Only Jesus Could Icefish in Summer (2014); Hank (2010); and Whim Man Mammon (2007). His reading highlights include stints at the Academy of American Poets’ Rooftop Reading Series and Opium Magazine’s Literary Death Match. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. Smith winters as Instructor of English at University of Alabama; Smith summers as farmhand (Farmall tractor rider) on Hawks’ Highland Farm.