HANK by Abraham Smith

HANK by Abraham Smith
Action Books - 132 pgs
$16.00

Abraham Smith hails from Ladysmith, Wisconsin. His poetry collections are WHIM MAN MAMMON (Action Books, 2007) and HANK (Action Books, 2010). Last summer, he won Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match NYC; this summer, he will be milking sheep on Hawks' Highland Farm. He teaches at University of Alabama.

"In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's HANK risks a caterwauling quagmire both lyric and epic in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paean to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving, and raw. HANK is an 'elegy for gravel' along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry"--Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

“Once when I was lost in the desert, I found a little sun-bleached book that had been written by bees, then translated into Lamb, then translated back into bees for the birds. It was the mad story of America—of 400 years all at once—as told by a cattle auctioneer. It took its own sweet time to unwind. Reading over the words felt like I was getting a tattoo on my eyes. HANK is the sequel to that book.”
—Jennifer L. Knox

Review by Blake Butler at HTMLGIANT