Publications
Café Dissertation
by D. James Smith
This poetry collection of love and wonder makes clear that what lies in the grave truth of love is an inherent loss. Yes, the poet says, there is pain here, but it is akin to, say, what is felt when a thorn is plucked quickly from the flesh and followed, then, by the warm flush of sudden clarity, a keener knowledge-the astonishment at being fully alive. It is the passing of all things which gives them their preciousness. Yes, this is a fallen world replete with the sting of death, but it is redeemed each time that sensing the cost, we choose to love anyway, embracing its necessity. Whether it is in stopping to notice the widower, the anorexic, the disabled child, or cattle to slaughter, spare buttes and dry fields, landscape specific to the harsh beauty of the interior of California, we too stop as if at stations of the cross, infused with a kind of religious Yes to our allotments of sorrow as they prompt us again and again to go on living fully-loving. This is no work of theology; these poems bypass the mind to warm the heart directly. Remarkable and certain is the achievement of these vital, elegant epiphanies.
“What a gorgeous journey of a book you hold in your hands! D. James Smith’s Café Dissertation lowers us down into the difficult, sweet well of the world’s elegiac heart, where the steady rain of the quiet moments we call our lives pours down, where “the dead are still forever/ sacred in the stations of the imagination.” The San Joaquin Valley is a generational well-spring of poetry in America, and Smith’s verses add to this tradition, poem by poem. There is so much tenderness here, paired with a hard eye for the world we inhabit, filled with moments that will make you “want to go to your knees or throw your head/ back watching a jet fighter vectoring east over the desert/ on a crisp morning, afterburners pulling hard right out of your heart.” This is the real stuff here. This is a book made of tears and love and living. And as painful as it is—goddamn if it isn’t beautiful, too, and loving, from the first word to the last.”
– Brian Turner
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