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

Name: Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire by C. Henry Smith
SKU: 4113
Availability: InStock

$17.99

Paper

$17.99

979-8-89990-066-2

2025

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.

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C. Henry Smith is the author of the poetry chapbooks Warren (Ghost City Press) and Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire (Finishing Line Press), and his Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated work has appeared in Colorado Review, DMQ Review, Psaltery & Lyre, LIT, and others. He received his BA at St. Edward’s University and his MFA at Oregon State University, and he is grateful for past residencies through Spring Creek Project and Chicago Art Department.

PRAISE:

Twenty-Four Covers of a House on Fire by C. Henry Smith is a sweeping, sonically rich long poem that moves through the shifting terrain of memory, desire, and loss. Written in long, unspooling lines, it carries the reader across dreamscapes where “time uncoils like a well-wound saddle line,” into landscapes lit by startling juxtapositions and moments of quiet revelation. Smith’s imagery—at once intimate and expansive—opens doors to profound discoveries, inviting us to inhabit a world where past and present blur, and the boundaries of language and time dissolve.

–Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University

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