The Postcult Heart

On the eve of her wedding, a mother hands her daughter an unpublished manuscript—a collection of love poems—written by the famous writer and matriarch of the family, Booker Makepeace. Booker had bequeathed the manuscript to her own daughter three decades earlier on the eve of her wedding before she disappeared. What do they mean, these snapshots of love? Are the poems instructions? Warnings? Documentaries? Clues? Lies? Revelations? Lovesongs?

For the Makepeace women, it is all they have left to live by.

The Postcult Heart is a meditation on love written as a series of feminist epistles from fictional women. Presuming to tell the love stories of real women, this collection offers a grim yet gorgeous wisdom won through a moral intensity that is fierce, raking, but also forgiving. The poems are prayers for a fallen world, offered with astonishing insight into the human struggle where the materiality of love is treated as our most urgent subject. The domain of the confessional voice is extended here into new and electrifying territory.

These poems are a silver needle filled with the strangest sort of dope. The trip is both brutal and beautiful. The hallucinations are true. And I’m laughing over the pain. Bradley Smith has done it again.

– Charlie LeDuff, Pulitzer Prize author of Sh*tshowl, Detroit and US Guys