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In a series of spare evocative poems, framed by two lyric essays, Smith presents a search for meaning in terms of memory, the self, and national narrative. The Passenger inhabits multiple iterations of selfhood across time, spanning over 30 years and starting with site-specific images of the author’s experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Yemen in the early 1990s. The violence of US imperialism, the sacrifice of lives in the ongoing wars on terror, and the author’s own lived encounters between cultures trace an echo of mnemonic layering. Smith subtly guides the experience of embodied but unsettled subjectivity, questioning the dominance of Western idealism and what it means to contend with national identity through recollection.
“With a kind of clipped historical shorthand, the use of the fragment in The Size of Paradise becomes a supercharged lyrical force that is also sprung with time. The momentum of this capacious book-length sequence keeps turning outward as it investigates an inward subjectivity…. Smith has written a high-stakes recounting of time and experience expanding the world we live within and that lives within us.”
—Peter Gizzi
“What is lyric’s relation to history, to a public today? In this poetry—the impossible heart beating intensities through every human murmur and whisper that manages to lift itself up into song into solace. In this poetry, the deep neon glow of America visible from across fake nations’ lines, pulsating broken geographies, rent histories, torn earth. Deep gratitude to Dale Smith for willing more beauty and more tenderness into the world.”
—Stephen Collis
“[Smith’s] poems are auto-biographical; personal, yet universal. They are permeated with history and geography; socially aware and impassioned. At the same time, they can be quiet, even tender. Dale weaves textures of culture and memory that explore and question the experience of being alive in a volatile world.”
—Kim Dorman
“Not since Haniel Long’s retelling of Cabeza de Vaca’s poignant journal of his wanderings has an American writer so vividly and particularly located the mind and heart of those historic particulars. Here is initial America sans the hype, the heart-breaking first story.”
—Robert Creeley
Dale Martin Smith is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Size of Paradise (knife|fork|book, 2024), a finalist for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Flying Red Horse (Talonbooks, 2021). His editorial contributions include That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making (University of New Mexico Press, 2025) and An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson (University of New Mexico Press, 2017). He is a professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University and lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Sana’a
Hodeidah
Aden
Sabaean Notes
Cities
Scapegoat’s Fate
Acknowledgments