raw & zero

This is devotional poetry, straddling the erotic & religious, affirming human connection. smith believes empathy strengthens the soul, that feeling broken by the news & all that’s collapsing persuades your soul of its worth, as long as you’ve oriented yourself properly (in your sex, writing, & political lives). smith’s “acts of devotion to the material world” grieves friends’ deaths & deaths our taxes paid for, demanding that past & future reconcile.

raw & zero is a book of ecstatic verses contemplating spiritual & trans personhood, an erotic poetics insisting that everything is holy, the asshole is holy, the “transsexual revert” is holy, the jouissance of the mixtape is holy. imogen offers us a vision of God as emoticon, sort of like a creepy ghost with four eyes. This is a deep exploration of divine mystery, & inevitably, a revelation of poetry’s numinous capacity to “let love hasten.”

With a hundred & one reasons why we have our hands & faces in the dirt, imogen smith’s poems grow as if their natural habitat is with herbs & flowers, fruiting bodies & vegetation. These unashamed verses are a study in erotics & belonging, the poet a “constant student to desire”, reminding us that change is a continuum, beginning in our own bodies. An invitation to open every node, synapse, orifice & petal. God is Earth—wade in.

dear imogen—i’m thinking about how “evenings are for sex & soft drugs,” how you & i both “belong to god,” how the word profane can also mean ordinary, routine, & how yr poetry refracts & distributes an ecoslutty gospel—& i’m doing all this while sucking on a rock still warm from the sun. love, tatiana.