It has been said we spend all our lives recovering from childhood. Moment by accessible moment, the reader is challenged to reconcile their own growing pains. These poems shine a light on disenfranchised and desperate parents, the ghost of nonage, and layers of one family’s coming apart. Mostly, there is no judgement. If it’s possible to stop the sins of the father,
Smith has done so by becoming a parent with understanding and remembrance. He works to make it right. In Strongman Contest we read what human beings rarely have the audacity to say, let alone leave a trail of poems that ache with truth.

Stellasue Lee, author of Queen of Jacks

Steven M. Smith’s Strongman Contest is a book of fathers and sons, of mothers and wives, of Limburger and onion on paper plates, of violence and redemption. Prepare yourself for an electrifying journey as the speaker navigates his father’s rage, risky teenage games, lakes of beer and thunderclouds of cigarette smoke, and his own marriage and parenthood making a home amidst sugar maples and kneeling weeds. Stand by him as he flinches beside his father who’s just shotgunned the family photo album to bits, as he waits with his rake to gather up the leaves, / the dead pictures, [his] father’s empty shell. Recognize the boy in the man as his imagination continues to transform the details of his life into clarity, into magic, as he resists turning into his father, as he bequeaths tenderness upon his own son, as he transmutes life’s barking / Doberman into a white dove.

Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun

Family tensions and the enduring poignancy of those relationships are evoked in Strongman Contest. A boy’s complicated love for his father is central; that love is tinged with confusion, competition, and even fear. Steven M. Smith’s imagery stands out when the boy goes bowling with his dad, catches him with other women, finds him drunk yet again, or is belted by him. The odds might seem stacked against these fallible humans, but what ultimately resonates is empathy and resilience as one generation burdens and enlightens the next.

Donna Steiner, author of Lost and Found in Ocean County, New Jersey and Elements