Humans & Horses

After reading this book I dreamt I had a sex change and woke after surgery looking EXACTLY like Logan Ryan Smith! "BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE," you say. I KNOW, I KNOW! Which poem did it to my dream? "...faulty memory / and harrowed indulgence / caught / off / guard." Logan sticks his knee into the back of the poem's neck on the ground, MAKING IT BEND in new ways! The illiterate should learn to read JUST to experience his transformative powers! But you can already read, you are reading this. Are you really still standing there WONDERING if you should buy this book!? Take it up to the register and pay for it NOW! GEESH!

\--CAConrad, author of THE BOOK OF FRANK

Logan Ryan Smith's HUMANS but maybe even more painfully, its efforts are just "laps," a spectacle for the viewers, who, in Smith's grandstands, are no less worked than the horses. The gun that signals the start of their labor completes the life, and labor, of the human. Humans & Horses is the lyric record of a life lived between the gun and the payoff and back. Along the way, it's a record full of friends, beers, architectures and, yes, records of the turntable variety. The horsepower in the book finds its expression in "ABSENSE," which I read as a comment on the true work of memory, as a translative force derived from sensory impressions. But not all is (Spicer-inflected)-fun and games: there's a sinister hand whose fingers stay on the trigger: "my sense of history / is a boss."

\--Brandon Brown, author of THE GOOD LIFE