The Book of Daniel

The direct and vulnerable fourth collection from Smith (Blue on Blue Ground) explores queer identity, masculinity, and mortality, informed by the American obsession with celebrity in various forms. . . . This newest collection offers an expansive, diverse consideration of identity and grief.

Whereas Smith’s previous book of poetry, Primer (2016), dealt in nuance and innuendo, he shows a more easily humorous side to his writing here, while still addressing serious topics with breathtaking severity. . . . Smith’s poetry proves endlessly provocative, often difficult, but never more of the same.

Aaron Smith’s newest poetry collection The Book of Daniel might read like an homage to pop culture, poetry, and gay icons, but these poems ache with lust, anger, desire, grief, and sex, and they offer no apologies for not being able to reconcile the ways those things coexist.

Aaron Smith is queer poetry’s lacerating, arch, self-aware satirist in the age of poetry-branding, ‘everyone / saying they’re brilliant.’ (If Smith had a brand, it might read, No more being peaceful, as he writes at the end of ‘I Pledge Allegiance to the Fag.’). The poems in The Book of Daniel, damaged and violent and intimate, wryly circumspect, demand nothing—certainly not admiration—other than the reader’s unflinching attention. I admire them, and get the hell out of their way.

Does anyone have / a poem to Cher?’ I doubt it’s as honest or fresh as the poems in The Book of Daniel. Can a poet be as well-versed in Plath, Lorde, Olds, and Baraka as he is in celebrity and pop culture? Spoiler alert: hell, yeah. With the gift of a high-speed Internet connection, Smith maneuvers the confusing messages of grief, rejection, and, yes, contemporary poetry. Poets beware: you are not off the hook. Smith brilliantly challenges everything you hold sacred.

Reading The Book of Daniel is like catching up with a raucous, well read, deeply sensitive, mercilessly candid friend. With astonishing turns—heartbreak to hilarity and back—the poet leads us through fantasy, brutality, daydream, irreverence and devotion. Smith’s wit is impressive, not irony-as-evasion, but laughter of the highest order, retrieved from bewilderment and sorrow. These poems will reward your attention with their effervescence and their depth.

Aaron Smith writes with arresting, melancholy literalness about bruises, exaltations, arousals, delectations, and defeats. He doesn’t mess around with filigree. He sticks to abject delineation, punchy straightforwardness—a new way of being formal and naked. I believe in these gripping poems, and in their message to the world.

Aaron Smith’s The Book of Daniel has remained at the top of my reading pile for weeks now. I go back to it again and again, because I don’t know of any other contemporary poet who so skillfully combines sexuality, popular culture, and self-revelation. Smith can skewer the pretensions of the poetry world as only someone deeply in love with and committed to contemporary poetry can do. The poems in this collection are wry and biting and, I bet, really fun to write. Except for the utterly heartbreaking ones. Because make no mistake, Smith can turn from funny to rueful to wrenching like turning a page, or jumping from one line of verse to another. In this book Smith joins the ranks of his heroes, Sexton, Plath, and O’Hara, to name three. I bow to his mad skills, he’s one of the best poets writing today.

Smith’s themes have always overlapped, but in his new collection, he is explicitly interested in mashing up his various subjects and references, often within a single poem. The associative, frequently double-spaced lines of The Book of Daniel feel looser—wilder—than in Smith’s previous work, perhaps a reflection of what many Americans characterize as the increasingly chaotic tenor of our age. . . . It’s thrilling to witness a poet who was once told he shouldn’t write about blowjobs so that his poems could be 'relevant to a larger community' (“Ars Poetica”) and who still 'hate[s] how helpful [he is] even when not asked' (“Get Thee to a Nunnery”) writing about whatever he wants. This book is characterized, in part, by Smith’s compelling confidence—even (or perhaps especially) when it’s his self-loathing that he’s confiding.