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Bruce Smith

Bruce Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of six books of poems: The Common Wages; Silver and Information (National Poetry Series, selected by Hayden Carruth); Mercy Seat; The Other Lover (University of Chicago), which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Songs for Two Voices (Chicago, 2005); and most recently, Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. He teaches at Syracuse University.

  • Willie Mays Lives at Adjacent Moments in Time

    Because he would be seen

  • Dear Lucinda Williams and Dear Jules

    A power in proximity to terror, the lower middle-class sublime of a car’s back seat,

  • DOMINION HELD AND ALTERED BY CHILDREN

    Feral children leave the inside screens

  • BIRD

    I lived between the hemisphere of songbirds and the hemisphere

  • I hitchhiked through Harrisburg once: night and some light dislocating, | A self beyond herself singed by the stars, fundamentally | Not the violent deaths that follow you around [if you were black] but the slow

    I hitchhiked through Harrisburg once: night and some light dislocating,

  • Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus | I’m sure some animals negotiate and plea.  I’m sure there’s a hard winter’s compromise | Lou Reed sings “Berlin,” a voice that has in it paradise if paradise was broken

    Another case of sitting still in a room as for chamber music minus

  • Thinly Veiled

    In Alabama I learnt the difference between the state flag and the battle flag