eBook - ePub
Primer
About this book
In his third poetry collection, Primer, Aaron Smith grapples with the ugly realities of the private self, in which desire feels more like a trap than fulfillment. What is the face we prepare in our public lives to distract others from our private grief?
Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.
Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.
The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.
Smith's poetry explores that inexplicable tension between what we say and how we actually feel, exposing the complications of intimacy and the limitations of language to bridge those distances between friends, family members, and lovers. What we deny, in the end, may be just what we actually survive.
Mortality in Smith's work remains the uncomfortable foundation at the center of our relationship with others, to faith, to art, to love as we grow older, and ultimately, to our own sense of who we are in our bodies in the world.
The struggle of this book, finally, is in naming whether just what we say we want is enough to satisfy our primal needs, or are the choices we make to stay alive the same choices we make to help us, in so many small ways, to die.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- X X X
- Ruined
- Still Life with Gun
- Notes for a Lecture: Keith Haring
- Homosexuality
- Ars Poetica
- A Letter Regarding Your Recent Artwork
- Liquid
- Poem for Straight Guys
- Like Him
- Not All Faggots Bump Themselves off at the End of the Story
- Middle School Summer
- X X X
- Blue Exits
- X X X
- Bleached
- The Worried Well
- College Summer
- The Julianne Moore Collection
- Jack White Gives Contract Advice to the Poet
- Nothing
- Takeout
- New York Pretending to Be Paris
- Born Again
- Dirty
- Still Life with Train
- Boston: Late Summer
- Shoot
- This Exact Sky
- X X X
- This Unknown Buried in the Known
- X X X
- The River Phoenix Collection
- X
- When You Told Me Your Father Was Dying
- Still Life with Antidepressants
- Jennifer Lawrence
- Still Life with a Hundred Crucifixions
- Homosexuality
- Evangelical
- Lessons
- David Beckham Is People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive
- Primer for Men
- Each Light a Knife
- The Bar Closes But You Don’t Want to Go Home
- Driving North on Interstate 99 the Poet Considers His Life at Forty
- X X X
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
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Yes, you can access Primer by Aaron Smith in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.