Multiverse

Poetry. Before reading the poems in Mike Smith's remarkable new book, the reader must take a good long look at his opening note on method. Smith means and does just what he says in this note. I've seen these acts of Houdini-magic unfolding over the last several years, and I've published a number of them in Notre Dame Review. To watch Mike Smith load himself with chains and then escape with a kind of elegant grace is astonishing. The more ambitious poems in 'Anagrams of America'--the anagram of Pound's first Canto, for example, and the whole of 'Multiverse: A Bestiary'--are expressions of a weird and even troubling genius. I don't know of anything else quite like them anywhere--John Matthias.