U&I

In a terse yet tender full-length debut, Smith examines the kind of shared language that is created when two people spend extensive periods of time being together. A shared sense of identity emerges as well, in the form of a third kind of creature: in Smith’s world, you and i are separate beings capable of feeling loneliness, but “u&i” is armed against it because the outside world is powerless to invade it: “u&i sat so closely there was no turning towards anything else.” Smith largely hews to plainspoken language, but there are occasional notes of whimsy that arise from the act of imagining a new world into existence, as in “a curious of gentlemen and a genuine of unicorns met in a wood.// u&i couldn’t stop laughing.” As Smith builds up the world of u&i, the text becomes a myth of creation, then of destruction. There’s a meadowed forest and a noisy, crowded city where “things could be heard when nothing seemed to be happening”; the city is foreign while the forest is home. Once left behind, though, home is “no longer a place to return” because “our every else had been ruined while u&i were away.” Smith’s poems build slowly, weaving a focused meditation on existence, loss, and shared domesticity. (Nov.)