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Above Ground by Clint Smith

Source: Publisher
Paperback, 128 pgs.
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Above Ground by Clint Smith explores the impact of parenthood on a worldview, and how our historical institutions and personal histories influence their parenting, and how the social and political turmoil can creep into your life.

The collection opens with “All at Once” provides readers an opening sense of overwhelm. Everything is happening simultaneously in different places from the child learning to walk to the wildfires destroying the forest to teachers calling parents about good deeds of students to scientists finding a vaccine to a mother getting the sad news that cancer has returned. All of it is overwhelming in so many ways, much like becoming a parent can be. Isn’t that when the worries start piling up?

Smith’s poems are fundamental and sweet — the anticipation of a child’s birth even across miles and over FaceTime. But they also can call us to the chopping block like in “When People Say ‘We Have Made it Through Worse Before'”: “But there is/no solace in rearranging language to make a different word/tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe//does not bend in a direction that comforts us./ (pg. 12) and in “Roots” where the narrator reminds us: “Your life is only possible because of his ability/to have walked through this country on fire/without turning into ash.” (pg. 25)

“Lines in the Sand” is a poem that should speak to every parent and should tell our policymakers to rethink their actions. I cannot begin to tell you how emotional the lines in the poem are. “Legacy” is another of my favorites. It is just beautiful.

Above Ground by Clint Smith is more than a collection about parenting and parenthood. It’s about the care we should take with all the children, with our Earth, and with our own lives. We should not be idle and we should take our own steps to make things better. We want to stay alive, we must act, not be idle.

RATING: Cinquain

About the Poet:

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His forthcoming poetry collection, Above Ground, will be published March 28, 2023.

Mailbox Monday #709

Mailbox Monday has become a tradition in the blogging world, and many of us thank Marcia of The Printed Page for creating it.

It now has its own blog where book bloggers can link up their own mailbox posts and share which books they bought or which they received for review from publishers, authors, and more.

Thank you to Velvet for stepping in when Mailbox Monday needed another host.

Emma, Martha, and I also will share our picks from everyone’s links in the new feature Books that Caught Our Eye. We hope you’ll join us.

Here’s what I received:

Above Ground by Clint Smith for the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith’s lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children’s lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up—through the changing world of which we are all a part.

Disbound by Hajar Hussaini for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Hajar Hussaini’s poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one’s language. The traces she finds—the flow of international commodities implied in a plosive consonant, an image of the world’s nations convening to reject the full stop—retrieve a personal history between countries (Afghanistan and the United States) and languages (Persian and English) that has been constantly disrupted and distorted by war, governments, and media. Hussaini sees the subjectivity emerging out of these traces as mirroring the governments to whom she has been subject, blurring the line between her identity and her legal identification. The poems of Disbound seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.

Sound Fury by Mark Levine for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

The Pause and the Breath by Kwame Sound Daniels for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Kisses at the Espresso Bar by Anita Nahal for Gaithersburg Book Festival.

Accomplished by Amanda Quain, purchased from Audible.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Georgiana Darcy should have been expelled after The Incident with Wickham Foster last year—at least if you ask any of her Pemberley Academy classmates. She may have escaped expulsion because of her family name, but she didn’t escape the disappointment of her big brother Fitz, the scorn of the entire school, or, it turns out, Wickham’s influence.

But she’s back for her junior year, and she needs to prove to everyone—Fitz, Wickham, her former friends, and maybe even herself—that she’s more than just an embarrassment to the family name. How hard can it be to become the Perfect Darcy? All she has to do is:

  • Rebuild her reputation with the marching band (even if it kills her)
  • Forget about Wickham and his lies (no matter how tempting they still are), and
  • Distract Fitz Darcy—helicopter-sibling extraordinaire—by getting him to fall in love with his classmate, Lizzie Bennet (this one might be difficult…)

Sure, it’s a complicated plan, but so is being a Darcy. With the help of her fellow bandmate, Avery, matchmaking ideas lifted straight from her favorite fanfics, and a whole lot of pancakes, Georgie is going to see every one of her plans through. But when the weight of being the Perfect Darcy comes crashing down, Georgie will have to find her own way before she loses everything permanently—including the one guy who sees her for who she really is.

What did you receive?