“There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense while the world dries and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, and boil . . . It ruins everything you have ever saved.”             Spill is a book in contradictions, embodying helplessness in the face of our dual citizenship in the realms of trauma and gratitude, artistic aspiration and political reality. The centerpiece of this collection is a lyrical essay that recalls the poet’s time working at the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg in the 1960s. Mentored by the insouciant inmate S, the speaker receives a schooling in race, class, and culture, as well as the beginning of an apprenticeship in poetry. As he and S consult the I Ching , the Book of Changes, the speaker becomes cognizant of other frequencies, other identities; poetry, divination, and a synchronous, alternative reading of life come into focus. On either side of this prose poem are related poems of excess and witness, of the ransacked places and of new territories that emerge from the monstrous. Throughout, these poems inhabit rather than resolve their contradictions, their utterances held in tension “between the hemispheres of songbirds and the hemispheres of men.”   “Smith dismantles the boundaries among the lyric, travelogue, and philosophy in this hybridized collection. . . . As Smith shifts gracefully among locales, genres, and temporal moments, the text performs and enacts its apt title, questioning the extent to which any individual voice exists apart from a shared cultural imagination. . . . Smith’s volume considers history, violence, and subjectivity with compassion and remarkable insight.” ― Publishers Weekly “Bruce Smith makes poetry from not-poetry, art from not-art, in these savage songs where history clashes with ecstasy. From the central prose sequence of prison life in the Vietnam years to chants and curses of our own day, this Song of My Smashed Self mourns, accuses, confesses, and multiplies. Bruce Smith is writing fully political lyric, ‘patterns of the blast.’” -- Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat “This is a book through which we can ride smoothly into a time, a place, its passions and terrors; however, when you glance in the rearview mirror you see that the gravel has been churned up by your traveling at such speed, that you’ve left Earth with this poet, that you are not where you expected to be, but you are where you never doubted you should be going.” -- Laura Kasischke, author of Space, In Chains Bruce Smith is the author of six books of poems, most recently, Devotions , the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University.    Spill By Bruce Smith The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-57041-9 Contents Acknowledgments, Beautiful Throat, Garden, Summer Rain, Raccoon, Goodbye Tuscaloosa, Ballad and Proposition, Gaze, What Are They Doing in the Next Room?, The Whiteness, Marvin Gaye Sings the National Anthem, 1983, "Are You Ready to Smash White Things?", Lewisburg, Meat, Run, Boilermaker, Bird, Sister, Button, Pollen, Honey, True/False, Ferment, Index, CHAPTER 1 BEAUTIFUL THROAT Beheadings, slaughter of the innocents, suffering and sorrow say all the stabbed, ecstatic art of the museums and more of the same says the news, the glowing, after glowing now what, but also in the crowded galleries babies held by mothers looking at babies being artfully held in the celestial rain, the fat buttery ones, part putto, part lard, who appear ready to slip from mother's arms out of the frame into smoke and storm, the nonart part of the world, that disobedient, expensive part like a furious sea you paid to cross in an inflatable plastic raft, a child's toy in a bath it looks like from America where we have no fate we can't make. Our stars are wire transfers and firearms. Our future the bewitched mixture of fuel with seawater with hubris that incinerates the self. And character is the decree of childhood evaporating into unauthorized space where the I/you is so much questioning and answering nonart. In art I see the gold leaf, the gashes, the beautiful throats and hear the trauma arias of martyrdom that are the same in nonart cities and deserts. There are two schools: one that sings the sheen and hues, the necessary pigments and frankincense, while the world dries, and the other voice like water that seeks to saturate, erode, or spoil. It can't be handled. It can't be marble. It wants to pool and vanish and pour and soak the root systems. It ruins as it changes as it saves. GARDEN I walked in the romantic garden and I walked in the garden of ruin. I walked in the green-skinned, black-skinned garden of Osiris who was ripped to pieces and reformed and adored. I walked in that wet, incest