The Flightless Years by Jamie L. Smith

“Mine wasn’t the sort of epic downfall myths are written about,” says the speaker in “Flawed Mythologies,” the lyric essay and psychic spine of this searching debut collection. Without a trace of self-dramatization, refusing easy resolution, preferring question over blame, Jamie Smith’s insightful poems explore loss, absence, addiction, the violence and contradictions that haunt our most intimate relationships. We cannot recover our losses, but we can recover. The Flightless Years is the deeply intelligent, beautifully wrought record of this struggle.

–Donna Masini

Moving between fact and fantasy, the personal and mythological, childhood and adulthood, the poems in The Flightless Years attempt to reconcile what is lost with the act of remembering itself. Whether it’s in long elegiac lyrics like “Flooring” or her “Flawed Mythologies” series, Smith focuses on tangible, fragmentary details of the past that should make memories easier to recapture and reconcile. And yet these same memories evade adult comprehension, thus the collection gestures to the impossibility of catharsis, becoming less about narrative reclamation and more about continued metamorphosis and destruction. When faced with the difficulty of healing the past, how can we not turn lost friends, parents, and lovers—even ourselves—into “flawed myths” of love? Jamie Smith is a writer asking the hard—maybe even unanswerable—questions about identity and change, a writer who understands that each of us is a strange, hybrid creature of myth and memory.

–Paisley Rekdal

“[Flawed Mythologies] is a deftly choreographed and deeply felt essay. The essayist uses a tripartite structure and a combination of tones and dictions to fully exploit the possibilities of the essay—to create a moving exploration of how ideas and experience intertwine, how thinking about the past is an obsessive activity, thinly concealed by the forms of intellection and apparent arrangement, which may help us move towards what is difficult to consider, but will not, in the words of James Agee, ‘tell me who I am.’ Still, the attempt, which in this case is considered, offered with both the risk of revelation and the efforts of discretion. The result is a poetic acceleration at the end which is moving and earned.”

–David Lazar