Surgencies
a poem by Abraham Smith
Surgencies is a poem; surge with urge; surgery with urgency. Line and sound emerge as emergency scribbled on grass. The message is green. The knife fight of light barnswallow flight. All zig and zag. And when the singing mouths of the peeping frogs open everyone flies and crawls in. Which is to say, Abraham Smith’s eye is fast, but his ink is faster.
In Surgencies, he sings the sweet news that loving is prismatic pendulum. Smith seeks the right words for how frogsong sounds or feels, and with every lost left hand turn, he maps the grand effort of trying to articulate the varied and the vast.
Surgencies, Abraham Smith’s latest eco-audiological foray into our contemporary consciousness and rural locales, warns that “kicked skulls roll funny.” Prepare to get honey skulled.
“Abraham Smith weaves whimsy with his words. This is a magical collection filled with lines that echo long after they’re read.”
“Reading Abraham Smith’s Surgencies one is unmoored and swept away in the poetic river, serenaded by the tetradactyl calls of cranes and frogs. Brief eddies give way to a surge of words that goes on and on through memory and song. And like John Muir once said, ‘We may miss the meaning of the torrent, but thy sweet voice, only love is in it.'”
“Reading Surgencies aloud produces wonderful rumblings in the chest. It makes me think of Tibetan throat singing, and the didgeridoo, and big trains in the night. The Abraham Smith effect is vocamotive. And its spell will reach you.”
Book Details
Title: Surgencies: A Poem
Author: Abraham Smith
Publication Date: April 14, 2026
Trade Paperback
4.25 x 7
128 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-64-7
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
