Bad Ideas

By Michael V. Smith

Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.

Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: "An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas”; "I pull a Clark Kent / transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn't”; "Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?” Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: May 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780889711211

Book preview

Prayers

Prayer for Irony

After his wife left him for a juggler

they met in the supermarket—a tall

reedy man with fingers too fine

for his short, plump torso—the artist

did what he’d always wanted and

bought a young terrier at the pound.

He named it Irony, a cleverness

in the face of grief, because wasn’t it

he that suggested they invite his future

cuckold, the juggler, for coffee?

Around the house the dog pissed

everywhere paper hadn’t been laid,

making damp the hall closet, the sofa

and bed. Irony was a model pup

when the artist was free and the holiest

hell at deadlines. If the man had baggies

the shit was diarrhetic. Each evening

the artist cried, the puppy padded

across the room and slept. When, after

weeks of being single, the artist said yes

to an invitation to picnic in the park

with that intern who held the elevator

on occasion just for him, of course

he brought Irony who vomited

grass on the girl’s light blue Mary Janes.

Finally, the artist thought himself savvy

to rename the beast Happy. All day

the terrier bawled for the moon in

his small, convincing yowl until

the sun rose on the seventh day

and the man tried again with Lucky.

By noon, a transport had flattened fur

to grille, the nimble way a round dull

period at the end of a sentence

can render a trumped-up thought

finite.

Prayer for Hatred

Would evolution have given feathers

to the reptiles had they loved

the risks on the ground?

You resent your limitations, hatred

being the best of them. A force

for undoing, unavoidable,

hatred is your beast rising up

in the face of that which stands

between you and fresh water.

Must we debate if love

is its bright twin, or if love, siametic,

could live on its own?

Has hatred not liberated

more people than those who have done

the enslaving?

Dear hatred, sweet hatred,

do you not move our enemies

to know us better?

Prayer for Envy

Canvas envies paint.

The bullhorn envies

the voice without need

of a battery.

The diamond envies