Smoke
After a lifetime of writing, poet, writer, journalist, photographer and podcaster Kevin Nance publishes a full-length collection of longer poems. Smoke is an immersive and evocative, celebratory and heartbreaking journey towards a life of authenticity, personal values and hard-earned freedom.
"Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be."—Fenton Johnson
From the Book
First Light
What Others Say
Kevin Nance's Smoke is a major literary achievement, from a voice distinctly Southern and at the same time universal in its themes of longing, memory, and love for the created world in all its manifestations. Such a delight to read poems from a fellow farm boy! I hear echoes of W. H. Auden and Maurice Manning, another great Kentucky poet. Nance's poems are tender, poignant, elegiac, and at the same time as invigorating as any honest engagement with the past—the real past, the authentic past—should be.
Kevin Nance's collection is one of threat and peace, weaving rattlesnakes and pecan trees, hunger and God, a failing farm and photographing a stranger dancing in the street. Like many great collections before it, Smoke examines love, loss, and home, and does so in expansive, unique, and unforgettable ways. These poems are ones to be savored.
Smoke is a ferociously honest reckoning with hungers and survival: what feeds us, what sustains us, and what we do to keep going, even as the poet determines that "even limestone is no match for the lathe of eternity." Using an adroit mix of poetic forms, including his signature haiku, Kevin Nance's poems seize the physical, emotional, and sexual hungers in this collection. From a tobacco farm in North Carolina where both the brightleaf tobacco leaves and the poet's father's face are "veined, tanned, supple, creased," to the cityscapes of Lexington, Kentucky, these vivid poems, as the title poem depicts, will "circle your head like a wreath.
The poems in Kevin Nance's Smoke reveal well-crafted lines, chiseled and polished from mastering the art of the haiku. They are matted and framed by beautifully developed, stopped and fixed images that appear like old-school prints floating up through the surface of water. Poems like "Horse Capital," for example, sing with more honesty and hopefulness than Kentucky's actual state song. This satisfying collection opens as a tobacco-scented Bildungsroman, loses its innocence by easing into love poems with exquisite lines like "a duvet filled with the feathers of each other's breath," and moves across a life well lived into mature poems such as "Wilmington," revealing the world in all its ugliness and color.
About the Author
