The City She Was [Paperback]

Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Mountain West Poetry Series
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

When you open this book, expect serious role-playing and syntactic tap dancing.The City She Waspresents a world that brings 'the horizon line into your lexicon' and a poet's muse ('The Endangered You') is lent to a friend and returned 'a little more frayed.' Gim?nez Smith muddles and enchants with her many masks, leaving the ground a little less stable under our feet.
Matthea Harvey, author ofModern Life,Sad Little Breathing Machine, andPity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form

The human body has only five senses butThe City She Wasreroutes the architecture of experience so effectively that the reader is awarded a new unnamed sense, a soft power, one that reprioritizes our outdated reality with the gathering infrastructure of the geography of language. The whole aggressive world is this book's only enemy, and no one tricks absurdity into form, reality into abstraction, injustice into stylized verdict, and contemporary popular culture into a useful, heroic trap of surreal-her-wholeness like Carmen Gim?nez Smith.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, author ofSkin, Inc.andThe Maverick Room

Carmen Giménez Smithis the author of three collections of poetry,Odalisque in Pieces(University of Arizona Press, 2009),The City She Was(Center for Literary Publishing, 2011)andGoodbye, Flicker(University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) and a memoir,Bring Down the Little Birds(University of Arizona Press, 2010). She is the recipient of a Juniper Prize for poetry and a fellowship from the Howard Foundation for creative nonfiction. She is the publisher of Noemi Press, the editor-in-chief ofPuls4