A chapbook of new poems by Jordan Smith. (32 pages,  softcover,  7 x 8.5 in.)

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Jordan Smith is the author of eight full-length books of poems. Jordan is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations and is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.

“Whenever friends tell me they’ve lost faith in poetry or this country, I send them a book by Jordan Smith. Formally hewn in the American grain, as reliable as a Stickley chair and with the companionable embrace of a Craftsman bungalow, each of his books renews one’s hopes for poems and people, as well as one’s love for country fiddlers and garden fiddleheads.”

David St. John

"Jordan Smith’s Cold Night, Long Dog is a beautifully crafted book, a pilgrimage, a quest for calm acceptance even in a state of lost hope, disappointment. Kintsugi, a Japanese word for broken pottery whose cracks are mended with gold, mends the flaws of life. This work is widely referential. And reverential. An anonymous troubadour wanders thru its pages “To see a little to one side / where flame and flame’s shadow open their hands.” There are references to Basho and Auden, I Ching and Dao. Poems scroll down, like Chinese scrolls but in the American vein either detailed: “a two-bedroom house / On West Church Street” or sweeping, Whitmanesque views of the Hudson River Valley. How to survive at wit’s end the poems explore with provisional answer."

Lynn Strongin

from her review on Live Encounters