cool books for hot days
Hick Poetics, by Abraham Smith
“It’s a project built to consider class, authenticity, place — and it’s a book built to reclaim hick, a once proud word now turned pejorative,” English instructor Abraham Smith said of his new book, Hick Poetics. The countryside is the setting of many classic, celebrated poems, and this anthology of contemporary rural American poetry further explores how place and people are in conversation. The poetry of those who live off the beaten path has not been particularly publicized in modern anthologies; all the more reason to bring them to light according to Smith and his co-editor, Shelly Taylor. Smith offered this simple, final question: “Do we write the land or does the land write us?”
