Michael Dwayne Smith
Shaking Music from the Angry Air
by Michael Dwayne Smith
ISBN: 978-1-962405-23-2
$17.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)
Also available as an Ebook from online retailers. ISBN 978-1-962405-24-9
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Dwayne Smith lives near a ghost town in the Mojave Desert with his wife, rescued horses, and Calamity the California calico cat. He is the author of five books, Shaking Music from the Angry Air being his fourth. He’s a recipient of both the Hinderaker Poetry Prize and the Polonsky Prize for fiction; recent award nominations include three for the Pushcart Prize, three for Best of the Net, and one for the StorySouth Million Writers Award. His work appears in more than three hundred journals, magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and newspapers around the world, including The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Heron Tree, Star 82 Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Superstition Review, Monkeybicycle, Chiron Review, San Pedro River Review, and Heavy Feather Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Education and Educational Technology at Victor Valley College, and, when not writing or teaching, he serves as publisher/editor-in-chief of Mojave River Press & Review; he’s also served as editor-in-chief of the literary journals Cease, Cows and Mosaic, as guest editor of Cholla Needles Literary Journal, and as a judge for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize in book-length collections.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Shaking Music from the Angry Air, Michael Dwayne Smith keeps poems close to their source: mortality, wonder, and an infinite appetite for love. Frank and unpretentious, flinty, even brash, these poems sling us straight into the American southwest world of a boy-to-man quest through cities, coasts, and deserts. Smith’s self-revelatory, ravenous, duende-filled personas, saddled by the origin story of an alcoholic home, break loose in escapades riddled with coyotes, deaths, horses, lovers, and ravens, accrued as a thoughtful, sometimes humorous exploration of life both sacred and profane. Bracingly candid and inventive, gracefully elegiac, tough, passionate, Smith traverses the landscape of the spirit, from the wailing of a dead junkie to a greening mountain of soft regret to the moon-bright drunken dancing of his working-class genesis. This collection will take the reader on a bareback ride into a raucous world of poetry, to be consumed by haunting delights, truths unglimpsed, sorrows known, and, ultimately, a reconciliation of hope and despair.
ADVANCE PRAISE
Love—the agony, the ecstasy, the quest—love as the stay against death is the song of Shaking Music from the Angry Air. It is sung along the highways, in the barrooms, in the bedrooms, of Southern California. “Poem in Which I Survive,” is a standout. The first line: “I wake wondering why I am horizontal on my birthday.” Read this terrific book and find the answer.
––Donna Hilbert, author of Enormous Blue Umbrella
Poet Michael Dwayne Smith writes, “I take the fullness of life and death equal.” Set mostly in the American West, these poems journey through desert and cities alike, by turns lush and haunting like the landscape. Taken from a wide range of cultural figures, from Oscar Wilde to Etta James, Smith tries to make sense of one’s lifelong experiences, the cyclical nature of disillusionment and hope, regrets and desires. What accumulates is a book about living, told in a voice that’s furious, lyrical, and elegiac. ––Pui Ying Wong, author of Fanling in October
Shaking Music from the Angry Air by Michael Dwayne Smith is a fantastic collection filled with vivid imagery, amazing insight, and compelling references to the arts which inspired the journey. ––Ellyn Maybe, poet, musician, and lyricist
Michael Dwayne Smith gives us a brilliant, rollicking account of a life threaded from Los Angeles to the Mojave Desert, from boyhood to manhood. His observations are often tough and direct like the people he writes about, but also leavened with an earned grace, and a clear-eyed look at the music of love and poetry, the dazzle he finds in horses and coyotes. Jim Harrison would have loved these poems, applauding like Smith this “magical desperate quality to everything.”
—Tim Suermondt, author of A Doughnut and the Great Beauty of the World
Michael Dwayne Smith’s Shaking Music from the Angry Air is an ultra-rich, self-revelatory and confessional tapestry of familial alcoholic disturbances, youthful desert desires, disappointments and starlit joy, a wolf howl through the chaos of growing up in unforgiving Southern California dreamscapes and Mojave mirage. The entire collection, Smith’s fourth, is buttressed throughout on masterfully crafted language, a scaffolding of humor, pathos, sexiness, cigarettes, lust and rust. The imagery and metaphors are deft and potent, daring, deliciously surprising, with sentences that read like smooth aged Scotch, crisp and wild, surreal, funny and bittersweet by turns, with tales of girls, women, and male longing sketched with vivid colors, riding on wild horses, falling into potent remorse. This is a damned serious collection of dazzling poems, each of which arrests the reader’s soul and never releases it from their grasp. —Jeffrey Bryant, author of The Catacombs of Vanished Lovers
Michael Dwayne Smith’s collection, Shaking Music from the Angry Air, is a tough, muscular ride. Grit your teeth, hold tight. Love and death loom even as you find “little tides and pools of promise” to somehow buoy you. This is a story of orange groves, warm beer, lust, and living through stuff to witness “distant laments, strange and precious.” You’re “dying upward” while “finding beauty in the breakdown.” This is a ride you’ll remember. —Carolyn Adams, author of Going Out to Gather
I enjoy reading and rereading Michael Dwayne Smith’s excellent poetry in Shaking Music from The Angry Air. In one poem he says, “My words make a ceiling I keep revising.” I feel that I stand under that ceiling, marveling at it. The poems often root deeply in memory. Many make reference to California. Smith can paint a sad situation, but moments of humor impact and surprise us. This book is a joy. —Kenneth Pobo, author of At the Window, Silence
Michael Dwayne Smith’s new collection opens with a stunner of a poem, loaded with vivid imagery and sharp, pointed observations and phrases that twist and surprise the reader. Smith manages to keep the intensity and freshness alive in his collection, spanning the sprawling California landscape whether in the streets of Los Angeles, the isolation of the Mojave Desert, or the lonely highways that lead to divergent points on the map and connect the flawed humans that inhabit that world. These poems offer a kaleidoscope of colors, images, and metaphors that startle. There is a sense of loss and hope, regret and delight, with an overriding layer of compassion and humor. In turn, surreal, compassionate, humorous, hopeful, and heartbreaking, these poems will stay with you. As Smith says in his poem “Maybe, Maybe”, There’s a kind of immortality to my dreams.
—Michael Minassian, author of Jack Pays a Visit and 1000 Pieces of Time
This poetry burns with energy, urgency, and an unflinching honesty that won’t let you look away. Each piece in Shaking Music from the Angry Air is a heartbeat, a protest, a submission woven with sharp perspective and raw emotions. Just when you think the work becomes too heavy, his words crack open a sliver of light, an “ah-ha” moment, a spark of humor. These are poems that demand your attention. —Linda Goin, author of She-Oak
