"Abraham Smith's DESTRUCTION OF MAN is a compass setting toward music caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of  river." —Tyehimba Jess, Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"Abraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head." —Patterson Hood, co-founder and frontman of the Drive-By Truckers

DESTRUCTION OF MAN is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn't work: this won't either: yet DESTRUCTION OF MAN is a book: a book by a poet/farmer about farming and a family man and a familiar county—stung body; stung land—as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what's left, and the hawk ate what's left, and then the hawk died of old age. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic music and all we have is love. In the words of Gertrude Stein: "After all anybody is as their land and air is."

DESTRUCTION OF MAN is now available for pre-order from Third Man Books and will be at bookstores everywhere 4/3/18. Every book includes a two poem flexi disc recording of Smith accompanied by accordion & drums. PRE-ORDER NOW.

Abraham Smith is currently on tour to AWP in Tampa. See dates below:

"I’ve been unable to decide if the best way to describe this book is as punk gone agrarian or if the agrarians went punk." —Juliana Spahr, Winner of the 2009 O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize