January House Literary Journal

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.

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.