{"id":6401,"date":"2025-02-14T13:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T18:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?post_type=product&p=6401"},"modified":"2026-02-18T15:10:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T20:10:43","slug":"lady-smith","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/lady-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"Lady Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"

Propulsive and erotic, searching and incisive, Jess Smith\u2019s debut collection <\/span><\/span>Lady Smith<\/span><\/span><\/em> explores the overlap between private and public violence. These poems investigate <\/span>the <\/span>troubled relationship between control and intimacy and deconstruct the messaging women receive about their bodies, starting in childhood. <\/span><\/span>Lady<\/em> Smith<\/em><\/span><\/span> 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.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

About the author<\/h2>\n

Jess Smith is the author of <\/span><\/span>Lady Smith<\/span><\/span><\/em>, the winner of the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize<\/span>. Originally from Georgia, she is currently an assistant <\/span>p<\/span>rofessor of <\/span>p<\/span>ractice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Praise for Lady Smith<\/em><\/h2>\n

Lady Smith<\/i> 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, \u201cDid you wear bare legs in some \/ goosebumped hope for this exact preamble?\u201d Or, in lines from the nimbly titled, darkly funny \u201cDARVO\u201d: \u201cSounds like dashcam<\/i>, like \/\/ doorway,<\/i> like bard<\/i>, like darnedest,<\/i> \/ like the flabbiest acronym, though \/ it was intended to tighten \/\/ the duration of comprehension.\u201d The poet’s title evokes a particular model of gun, but the collection ultimately invokes something more powerful\u2014survival instinct, a desire to devour and thrive, a dare to pleasure and be pleasured, to \u201cpink and thick and glisten”\u2014and the strange, unapologetic intimacies that can save someone\u2019s life once shared. Maybe yours.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOf course the sea \/\/ has teeth.\u201d And so does every poem in this collection that refuses anything less than reckoning\u2014with patriarchy\u2019s myriad trapdoors of violence, with family\u2019s maze of loss and tenderness, with desire\u2019s animal delights and all-too-human aches. In language at once forest-lush and bone-precise, Jess Smith demonstrates how an appetite for life\u2014for full aliveness\u2014is no easy thing to bear. After all, is it possible to \u201cname \/ a body part that is not a verb\u201d? To have teeth is to commune with the moonlight blazing across a bed that smells like the sea or sounds like one\u2019s own heart. To have a heart\u2014who would dare describe that? This poet, in this book, does.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These gorgeous, candescent poems confront pain, desire, and love with dark wit and stark, oracular clarity. \u201cNothing is enough \/ if you know how much you could have had,\u201d writes Jess Smith in her blazing debut collection <\/span>Lady Smith<\/span><\/i>, 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 \u201cGather,\u201d when she questions \u201csomething called a dangerousness hearing, which seems too obvious a title for a legal proceeding\u201d or in the poem \u201cInternalized\u201d when she admonishes the reader, \u201cDon\u2019t act \/ as if you\u2019ve never heard a ghost \/ wailing from the cellar \/ and simply turned the sitcom volume up.\u201d 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Emily Skaja, author of Brute<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lady Smith <\/span><\/i>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\u2019s nothing she can\u2019t write.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Tom\u00e1s Q. Mor\u00edn, author of Machete<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fierce, sharp poems in Jess Smith\u2019s debut collection offer a raw fusion of tenderness and violence, suffering and love. The speakers in these poems do not \u201cbruise easily\u2026 never have,\u201d and they do not look away from the cause of the violences against a woman\u2019s body, what that body endures, absorbs, and births. I praise this poet\u2019s courage and grace, her capacity to admit that \u201cmaybe it\u2019s better to go blind all at once, \/ and from something beautiful,\u201d than to look away and be silent.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Curtis Bauer, author of American Selfie<\/i>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Media<\/h2>\n

“The poet\u2019s final words remind us all that love is fleeting, so we must soak up every drop of it and close our eyes to savor each moment, even when it hurts.” \u2014Leigh Cuen, Southern Review of Books<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

“Reading \u201cLady Smith,\u201d I was struck by the juxtaposition of love and death, the necessary brushing up of one against the other (in the speaker\u2019s particular world)\u2013\u2013the inevitable annihilation lurking should the relationship continue.” \u2014Chelsea Woodard, 32 Poems<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jess Smith<\/h3>\n

Winner of the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Size: 6 x 9<\/p>\n

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