Destruction of Man, by Abraham Smith

Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn’t work: this won’t either: yet Destruction of Man is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar county–stung body; stung land–as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what’s left, and the hawk ate what’s left, and then the hawk died of old age. This is a book-length poem about small-scale family farming in the midst of the “get-big-or-get-out” mantra and foghorn. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrude Stein: “After all anybody is as their land and air is.”

Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in Destruction of Man