Disasterology

In Maggie Smith’s Disasterology the poems lie down and make angels in the fallout as a tide of fire drags everything away. Whip smart and darkly funny, Smith chronicles how disaster proves itself time after time, film after film, yet another doom after doomsday. But everything is not one red phone ringing away from ruin. There is a future still waiting to be said, a hope that the pear trees will outlast us, bright, unending, maybe even sweet. -Traci Brimhall As with the Hollywood hairdos of her poems’ heroines, no strand is out of place in Maggie Smith’s fraught and funny new chapbook. Smith brings her characteristic crispness and smarts to questions of disaster, large and small, with poems that expertly snake through iconic films, color-coded terror alerts, and the bleakest of daydreams. Read it, and read it fast-tomorrow we might all be gone. -Natalie Shapero