imogen smith, raw & zero

 

earth towers tilling trash, how can we do what we do to air?

What’s flying up there? A balloon? A kite? A drone? Us?

Kite peers down through gloaming, sees a beach, sunlit.

Sentimentality saves no soul, but the sun deserves a break from heartache.

What can we say but it’s just that simple—

webbed ecologies of breath (“hot muck making”)

The latest from Brooklyn-based poet and performer imogen smith, following her full-length debut, stemmy things (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], is raw & zero (Nightboat Books, 2026), an assemblage of confident and gestural lyrics, composed via monologues, performances and declarations, and hands waving into the air. “Tricky little venus,” begins the poem of the same name, “here’s something / you should know / —i am never / the most / liberated girl / in the room. / Sure, / i’ve slept in / all the right / beds, / floated in / streams / dreaming / life open / like a door / unto / valleyful.” Engaged with rich language and propulsive lines, there’s an element of cabaret to these pieces; over-the-top and experimental, playing with form across the canvas of both page and stage. As the poem “attn” begins: “Seated to poem / an act of devotion to the material // world. In silence i am eternal // -ly perturbed. Even the dumb / shit is sacred. Word [.]” These are poems that celebrate the body and heart of the transgender self, of the author’s transgender self, offering all with an equal acknowledgment; a kind of grace, writing the spiritual and the physical, God and assholes, in divine and equal measure.

This seems very much a book of declarations, as I suggested, although just as much a book of devotions, assembling a collage of poems and poem-shapes—from accumulating short lines, prose poems, meditative and long, languid sentences and visual gestures—into something both playfully and seriously grand, and singularly coherent. Or, as part of the lyric sequence “mutual peasure mutual” offers:

Evenings are for sex & soft drugs
a handful of paragraphs written or read
gravitational erotic flotsam between
precarity & nasal swabs        trips
to several pharmacies, markets
bookstore & boo’s, the rave in Queens
last Thursday night—all slick
w lube tongue sweat—so rare
‘s a pleasure, oft guilt in plague times.
Naked in bed, folding my sorrows
listening to Julius Eastman as cars zip
Pacific in pitch. Dream.