Mike Smith

How is it Shelley truly did believe that Byron's Don Juan would be the great poem of its time? How is it that satire and pastiche become the most durable monuments to our romance? to our romance of ourselves and of our aspirations? With Byron in Baghdad, Mike Smith has, against all the odds and against all the currents of our present depravity, written a work of beautiful renunciation. Chaste and chastening, these poems are pure. Their urgency will only increase over time. —Donald Revell