Be Recorder
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry • Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award • Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Carmen Giménez Smith dares to demand renewal for a world made unrecognizable
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world. The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of the most vital and vivacious poets of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An autobiographical speaker (a mother and first-generation American) catalogues the flotsam and jetsam of late-stage capitalism in the stunning sixth collection from Smith (Milk and Filth). With a prophetic voice rooted in awareness of a dying planet, 20 poems and a middle lyric sequence are impressively served by Smith's ear for pithy encapsulation: "why am I the locus of your discontent/ and not your president." Smith's speakers frequently turn to dark humor: "you can shape/ my toil into a robot with nearly real skin,/ but you can't touch the feeble efforts I make to retaliate;" "should I mother or write/ serve art or the state." Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Smith's writing is its refusal to downplay the speaker's complicity in a Darwinian system of profit, in which shopping at Amazon equates to "baring my economic thorax." The lyrical prose piece "American Mythos" turns ambivalence over the purchase of a video game into a meditation on impersonal cosmic forces, ending in a dystopian, speculative chronicle in which an airplane is described by future humanity as "a ship powered by bones that flew in the air without moving a single feather." Smith's image-driven metaphors circle the "molten core of the real," articulating shared dilemmas while jolting the reader out of complacence.
