Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire by C. Henry Smith

24 Covers… is a sweeping, chapbook-length poem of “startling and gorgeous” language, capturing dispatches from a speaker “stunningly adrift in capitalism, mourning a rootlessness or a distance from problematic roots.” The apostrophic work obsesses over the landscape of home—the physical landscape, the emotional landscape—on our private folklores, and on those rituals we cannot escape. It is at once a meditation on cows and then a meditation on the infinite incarnations of the body, on the practice of living while saturated in longing, and on the symbols and sins that make us who we are. Across the twenty-four sections, the author charts desire, hauntology, anxiety, and the relationship of self to an imagined past, utilizing lines that stretch past the page and a swirl of unlikely images that reach across the canyons, avenues, and dreamscape houses of the poem. This is a sonically rich and decidedly original achievement from a writer who sees sensations and emotions simultaneously occurring outside of the strictures of memory, language, and time. #poetry #longing #texas #selfhood #faith