Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 marks preeminent sound poet Steven Ross Smith’s return to verse form. In this sixth chapter of what’s become for Smith a life-poem (a long poem that encompasses a life), Smith bends, confuses, and disintegrates the fundamental premises of poetic and fictive form—working language, narrative, and meaning like sculptural material, and engaging with composition by sound and its visual placement on the page.

These poems emanate from specific works by other poets. Exalt in Smith’s highly torqued and playful language that riffs off of bpNichol, Sylvia Legris, Federico Garcia Lorca, Lisa Robertson, and other seminal poetic masters, in this charged, frenetic work that deals in nature’s precariousness and social conundrums.