“My home was destroyed like so many other people’s, and I finished my senior year of high school in Houston, Texas,” says Smith, speaking from his parked car shortly after school drop-off in Maryland. “I’m 34 now and it was 17 years ago, so it very cleanly sort of bifurcated my life in ways that are pretty wild.” Some of the book’s poems have been published previously
, but such juxtapositions heighten the emotional charge. “I wanted poems like that to sit alongside one another because that is how we experience the world. It’s not neatly compartmentalized,” Smith explains. There is no joy today, sadness tomorrow—especially with kids, whose questions about animal arcana might coincide with a devastating news alert. In a way, he says, human existence is “just a series of attempts to hold the complexities of life within our bodies, all at the same time.
The same goes for Smith’s three-day wellness diary, which glides through distraction and elation and nostalgia. Still, it’s hard not to feel the weight of “It’s All in Your Head,” a poem about a grave pregnancy complication dismissively overlooked by a doctor; her self-advocacy proved vital. Can a poem be a call to action, an impetus for keen observation, a time capsule for the next generation? Smith, who often writes during in-between moments , is now raising a first-time reader.