Stop Lying
Poems
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of Smith’s mother and how the poet, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. How does one grieve when a relationship will forever remain unresolved? What does it mean to both regret and not regret one’s decisions? What if survival doesn’t look like what we're told it should? This is the story of a poet pushing through present-day grief and the shame of the past to find the buried truths, the ones that are hardest to tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I'm tired of trying to be/ a good person," Smith writes in his visceral, tender, and compassionate latest (after The Book of Daniel). Smith's elegiac writing reveals a fervent desire to test the limits of one's empathy and understanding, resisting the urge "to rewrite// the world to suit them." Instead, these poems reveal the work attempting to see and describe the world as it really is, balancing a tightrope of complexity and compassion. "Maybe I'm defending him," Smith declares in a poem about his father, "If he's a bad man, it's because/ he's a broken man." Smith's titles are frequently as stirring as the poems themselves, such as "Maybe My Mother Had So Much Stuff Because She Was Lonely," "A Friend Says You Can Promise the Dying Anything," and "After My Mother Apologized for My Childhood, We Went to Brunch." This is a master class on how to write about loss and love. (Jan.)
