American Rambler
Product Description Poetry. Pulled from several sources, these poems combine influences from the Naufragios of Cabeza de Vaca, Nicolas Echevarria's film Cabeza de Vaca, and Haniel Long's Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, among others. In addition, italicized poems result from erasures, using the first two acts of Shakespeare's Tempest as a source text juxtaposed with quirky insights taken from William Carlos Williams and Frederick Turner. Illustrations by Philip Trussell. From Publishers Weekly Co-editor of the hand-painted and carefully edited magazine Skanky Possum and the author several small-press collections, Dale Smith here sets out to recreate and reenvision a primary American Rambler, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. A serious and fractured long poem centered on the disastrous and revealing decade (from about 1527 to 1537) that de Vaca spent in what is now Texas and the U.S. Southwest, the book's three sections include a verse investigation of de Vaca's targeted wanderings, a brief prose section called "Conquest Notes" and a keen and unorthodox essay on the late poet and critic Paul Metcalf. In the de Vaca section, Smith locates his explorations "[p]rior to stripmall America/ & smallpox/ before missions (Catholic & Capital)/ Europe compressed itself/ in Spanish Adam/ Alvar Nunez/ was delivered/ a relic/ of modern times." Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. About the Author Dale Smith (born 1967) is an American poet, editor, and critic. Smith was born and raised in Texas and studied poetry at New College of California in San Francisco. He now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, the poet Hoa Nguyen, and is working on a PhD at the University of Texas. While in San Francisco, Smith was co-editor of Mike & Dale's Younger Poets, which put him in contact with many important poets from previous generations as well as the young poets of his own generation. After moving to Austin in 1998, he and Hoa Nguyen started the small press publishing venture Skanky Possum. From November 2003 to October 2004, Smith wrote a lively column for Bookslut. Smith's poetry and essays have been widely published, including an appearance in The Best American Poetry 2002. Recently, he was chosen to write the introduction to Ed Dorn's Way More West (2007, Penguin).