Propulsive and erotic, searching and incisive, Jess Smith's debut collection Lady Smith explores the overlap between private and public violence. These poems investigate the troubled relationship between control and intimacy and deconstruct the messaging women receive about their bodies, starting in childhood. Lady Smith resists the urge to offer a tidy healing narrative, instead revealing the way victims absorb violence and try to live with the long shadows of cultural misunderstandings and self-doubt. Smith offers readers a fearless invitation to pleasure, sensuality, and our own complicity in everyday brutalities. Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith, the winner of the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize. Originally from Georgia, she is currently an assistant professor of practice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing. Lady Smith is raw and feral. These poems pulse with all the energy of a pistol, a target, and the bullet that brings them together. Jess Smith is a poet of incredible power and courage. There's nothing she can't write. Lady Smith crackles and reckons, urgent in syntax and imagery, as it unpacks a series of troubled relationships not just with others but with body and self. Let us be clear that the systems designed to regulate and manage violence commit, in themselves, a kind of violence, as when an academic bureaucrat asks, "Did you wear bare legs in some / goosebumped hope for this exact preamble?" Or, in lines from nimbly titled, darkly funny "DARVO": "Sounds like dashcam, like // doorway, like bard, like darnedest, / like the flabbiest acronym, though / it was intended to tighten // the duration of comprehension." The poet's title evokes a particular model of gun, but the collection ultimately invoke something more powerful-survival instinct, a desire to devour and thrive, a dare to pleasure and be pleasured, to "pink and thick and glisten"-and the strange, unapologetic intimacies that can save someone's life once shared. Maybe yours. These gorgeous, candescent poems confront pain, desire, and love with dark wit and stark, oracular clarity. "Nothing is enough / if you know how much you could have had," writes Jess Smith in her blazing debut collection Lady Smith, a book about trauma and the absurd bureaucracy of its aftermath. Moments of horror and grief are tempered by bleak humor, as in the poem "Gather," when she questions "something called a dangerousness hearing, which seems too obvious a title for a legal proceeding" or in the poem "Internalized" when she admonishes the reader, "Don't act / as if you've never heard a ghost / wailing from the cellar / and simply turned the sitcom volume up." The voice of this unforgettable debut is irreverent, resilient, and revelatory as she navigates the monstrous way the language of desire can echo the language of violence. "Of course the sea // has teeth." And so does every poem in this collection that refuses anything less than reckoning-with patriarchy's myriad trapdoors of violence, with family's maze of loss and tenderness, with desire's animal delights and all-too-human aches. In language at once forest-lush and bone-precise, Jess Smith demonstrates how an appetite for life-for full aliveness-is no easy thing to bear. After all, is it possible to "name / a body part that is not a verb"? To have teeth is to commune with the moonlight blazing across a bed that smells like the sea or sounds like one's own heart. To have a heart-who would dare describe that? This poet, in this book, does. The fierce, sharp poems in Jess Smith's debut collection offer a raw fusion of tenderness and violence, suffering and love. The speakers in these poems do not "bruise easily… never have," and they do not look away from the cause of the violences against a woman's body, what that body endures, absorbs, and births. I praise this poet's courage and grace, her capacity to
