In Shaking Music from the Angry Air, Michael Dwayne Smith keeps poems close to their source: mortality, wonder, and an infinite appetite for love. Frank and unpretentious, flinty, even brash, these poems sling us straight into the American southwest world of a boy-to-man quest through cities, coasts, and deserts. Smith's self-revelatory, ravenous, duende-filled personas, saddled by the origin story of an alcoholic home, break loose in escapades riddled with coyotes, deaths, horses, lovers, and ravens, accrued as a thoughtful, sometimes humorous exploration of life both sacred and profane. Bracingly candid and inventive, gracefully elegiac, tough, passionate, Smith traverses the landscape of the spirit, from the wailing of a dead junkie to a greening mountain of soft regret to the moon-bright drunken dancing of his working-class genesis. This dazzling collection will take the reader on a bareback ride into a raucous world of poetry, to be consumed by haunting delights, truths unglimpsed, sorrows known, and, ultimately, a reconciliation of hope and despair.
