Description

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The Death Metal Pastorals turns over the rolling green hills of the idyllic American landscape, excavates their violences, and attenuates the powers that live atop them. In Ryan Patrick Smith’ s pastoral, “ nothing works here but blood & radio" and from page one, we know we’ re entering a landscape at once more ominous and more vigilant than anything conjured by Spencer, Drayton, or Marlowe.


Smith’ s poems upend the topography of the pastoral setting, peering through a “ burning crop of disease” to ask, “ Where am I in the field that I give my will over to you?” Through a range of personas, from death metal swains to The Terminator‘ s Sarah Connor to Mister Rogers to a smartphone camera at a Black Lives Matter protest, Smith casts a piercing eye to the destructive structures of consumption, gendered violence, and white supremacy. As we enter this highly charged pastoral terrain, far from the bucolic or picturesque, we’ re asked to inhabit these structures and then to work to live beyond them.

About the Author

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Ryan Patrick Smith is a poet whose work has previously appeared in the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor for Boulevard Magazine and teaches in the MFA in Writing program of Lindenwood University. A Kentucky native, he has lived in Lexington, Kentucky and St. Louis, Missouri; right now, he resides with his spouse in Connecticut. The Death Metal Pastorals is his debut chapbook.