CLOUDBURSTS and CONSTELLATIONS

Poignant and personal, these poems trace tender cartographies of skin and kinship making drawn from genealogical topographies that waver with grief in beautifully 'concentric circles / of unknowing.' Smith pays close attention to the minutiae of life, from 'sunflecks' that incur 'a sharp intake of breath' to

histories both natural and familial, especially in concurrence with water-cycles both amniotic and migratory, telluric, oceanic, and riverine. From Wales to the Caribbean, from Louisiana to 'home', this is a moving poetic portrait of places displaced, and reunited, in distilled and sparkling form.

Shari Lynelle, also known as Shari Kocher, author of Foxstruck and Other Collisions (Puncher & Wattmann)

Lou Smith's elegiac poems interweave impacts of colonisation, slavery, displacement and complications of ancestry, evoking the 'scaffold of who we are' as 'Drift Seeds' born of complex, violent histories. Meticulous environmental poems unseat anthropocentrism, foregrounding toxified nature. When polystyrene icebergs 'bob in wave breaks' and spread 'pearls of polymer beans', we feel the searing acuity of the poet's gaze as urgent poetic lamentation.

A. Frances Johnson, author of Save As (Puncher & Wattmann)

Lou Smith's poems cling to you like your clothes dampened by the rain. These are not just words on the page but breathing journeys that you take, inhaling the moist air, listening to all the sounds surrounding you, and knowing you inhabit a world where nature dominates. Captivating!

Opal Palmer Adisa, author of The Storyteller's Return (Ian Randle Publishers)