Fluttertongue 5: Everything Appears to Shine with Mossy Splendour

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.