Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 marks preeminent sound poet Steven Ross Smith’s return to verse form. In this sixth chapter of what’s become for Smith a life-poem (a long poem that encompasses a life), Smith bends, confuses, and disintegrates the fundamental premises of poetic and fictive form–working language, narrative, and meaning like sculptural material, and engaging with comp-osition by sound and its visual placement on the page.

These poems emanate from specific works by other poets. Exalt in Smith’s highly torqued and playful language that riffs off of bpNichol, Sylvia Legris, Federico Garc a Lorca, Lisa Robertson, and other seminal poetic masters, in this charged, frenetic work that deals in nature’s precariousness and social conundrums.

Steven Ross Smith’s Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 ‘Sounds like Futurism / looks like Charades.’ It’s meant to provoke second-sight and attention to echoes, to what shimmers and whispers in the sensuality of sense.
–George Elliott Clarke, 2002 winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Execution Poems

Smith lays everything on the table for an earth under siege from high finance, rampant human pollution, and wars of the supermarkets. His lines spill and flow like winding rivers or lapping waves laced with erotically sensuous word-scents that take us to what flutters just within and without our grasp. – Meredith Quartermain, author of Rupert’s Land

Steven Ross Smith’s Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 both sets its own landing field and touches down, in poetry that bucks and soars. Even the hyphens dart about in this surprise-fest, this portrait of the poet as renewer and renewed. –Gerald Hill, author of Hillsdale Book