Resettlement by Clinton Smith

I am astonished by Clint Smith’s Resettlement. I have known and deeply admired his poems for years. I was not prepared for the power and authority of this sequence. He stands on glass in the sky that extends as far as the dead, extends forever. Beginning on Hope Street, these thirty eerie events, precisely calibrated in first-class poetry, add up as we can only wish our worlds can. Resettlement (the forcible process of moving people to a different place to live) addresses the sense we have that something is missing. Is this absence, mourning, and longing? Will it come together if we find what is missing? Is it the sense we are looking for? It is phenomena and poetry and our story. Here in these pages, an essential guidebook is provided. Going forward, the poet Clint Smith will be crucial for us on this path.

–Leonard Gontarek, author of The Long Way Home

With deepest empathy and skill, Clint Smith engages a multitude of voices, from that of a young man to his cancer to his aged mother remembering the details of giving birth. This multipart poem excavates both lost and new tongues that speak a more truthful rendition of this world: “…a country full of yurts on fire, animals and children inside// Fleeing goats, ballerinas, fascists along the roads—/ you were with me there in that plateau of mud.” This is the country where the reader, too, lives now, discerning in the darkest details a heightened beauty. From Hope Street where a baby crawls through broken glass on a night whose darkness is “that color of moonlit black that’s like a screen turning off” to what the cancer dreams, Resettlement brims with life at its most poignantly full—in the between, where a young man’s dying creates the place of strongest living.

–Lake Angela, author of Words for the Dead