For Appearances

First winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, this collection by Jordan Smith is what Sandra McPherson calls “a gem of a book.” Liam Rector says, “Jordan Smith has written some of the most important poetry of the post-Vietnam generation. His melancholic portraits of Upstate life are comparable to what’s most poignant in Thomas Hardy, Edvard Munch, and Ingmar Bergman. There’s a moral seriousness, a wry Yankee humor, and a heartbreaking strength of sentiment at work in Smith’s poems. They partake of a Shaker aesthetic: useful, beautiful.”