Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems by Jim Smith brings together brand-new work and selections from poetry published between 1979 and 1998. Smith, as always, writes from the front, where the personal and the political face off. His new work adds Nibbles the dog, Canadian poetry icon bpNichol and the Chilean leader Salvador Allende to the large cast of characters who populate his earlier work Ñ Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Graham Bell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris Dewdney, Leonel Rugama, the baby Jim, his dog Arnie, Williams Blake and Burroughs, John Wayne and Robert Heinlein. Smith’s project to personalize the political, and to politicize the intensely personal, has carried on over thirty years and is as vital and surprising as ever. While the name and location of the war may have changed (from Vietnam to a second war on Iraq), and while more friends, family and heroes have died, Smith refuses to forget Ñ or to stop reminding us of the delicate humanity we are in constant danger of losing.