Is he talking about botany or…hmmm…ahhh…well now. The very act of reading Steven Ross Smith’ fifth volume of his Fluttertongue series draws shock, secret smiles, and out-loud exclamations from the most stoic, stuffed-shirt readers of poetry. Rife and ribald, his disjunctive prose-poem forms contain stimulation for all five senses. Jumping off the page in explorations of joined oppositions, the richly-worded poems reveal beyond-intimate experiences of the physical world, exposing snapshots of human experience and relationships with nature. Personal-impersonal juxtapositions, syntactic structure, and randomness appear here in disjunctive prose poem form to express primal-scream poetry. Each page sets a prose-poem atop a sly and sensuous moss-like footer that unfolds at the bottom of each page, giving its own experience of wink-and-nudge word play. The book becomes a distraction in itself, tempting the reader to peek ahead, disregarding proper book-reading etiquette.
With Smith’s irresistible word-play and a deep and complex poetic sensibility, Fluttertongue 5 is a rich, rewarding and delightful read.