by Ron Smith (Author)
From the Mediterranean to the American West, the poems in Ron Smith's new collection move across time and place to find reliable truths through personal observation. Beyond his own experiences Smith draws from the lives of notable and diverse figures -- Edward Teller, Edgar Allan Poe, Mickey Mantle, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, and many others.
Its Ghostly Workshop probes the fallibility of philosophy while strengthening the quest for certainty. Wondering and weighing, these are poems capable of conviction as well as doubt. Like the city of Rome, the subject at the book's center, Its Ghostly Workshop aims to rewire us, to "virus" us, to "rush" us "with visionary blazes, cascades / of memory, incandescent logic."
Author Biography
Ron Smith was Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2014 to 2016. He holds the George Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching and serves as Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia, where he has also been an adjunct associate professor at the University of Richmond. Smith is the author of these poetry collections: Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (1988, second edition 2020), Moon Road (2007), Its Ghostly Workshop (2013), and The Humility of the Brutes (2017).