In Above Ground, Clint Smith transforms the mundane moments of parenthood into moving reflections on family, race, and the current state of the world. I’m not sure how objective I can be in reviewing the collection: it feels like a personal gift in this year when I’ve struggled with the yawning gap between what I’m feeling as a first time parent and what I can communicate to other people.

It often seems like there’s nothing to say about parenthood that hasn’t been said before, but Smith avoids cliche by playing with scale, juxtaposing the intimate and the immense. There are multiple poems in this collection about dinosaurs (in books, in bathtubs), odes to baby hiccups and the beauty of the baby swing, descriptions of kitchen dance parties and hotdog Halloween costumes. These entries share space with meditations on New Orleans after Katrina, on gun violence and military violence and the legacy of slavery. The existence of these poems next to each other makes clear the stakes of parenting in a world that can feel inherently dangerous.

Smith’s style is quite narrative, and there isn’t as much experimentation with syntax or language as I’m accustomed to with poetry. As a result, the collection sometimes reads a little like a memoir with line breaks. I can see it appealing to my most poetry-skeptical students, who ask every year why poetry can’t just say what it means. Most readers will find something here that speaks to them, I think; I know that I’m leaving with a profound sense of gratitude for Smith’s efforts to put words to the everyday enormity of parenting.

The words of Clint Smith have been my powerful companion for years.
Whether unraveling his poem "Counterfactual" with our predominantly white students and seeing their questions turn to understanding. Playing his TED talk "The Danger of Silence" and hoping that the words land true, that the kids in our care understand what it means to not speak up, that choosing to remain silent is a brutal action in itself.
"How the Word is Passed" became my must-read book of 2021, leading my mother and me to long conversations about how we experience history.
And now he has created another masterpiece that will travel with me for years. In "Above Ground", which releases tomorrow, I cried as he described what it means to send your child to school knowing that other little children never come back home due to gun violence.

I sat in our NICU memories as he wondered what happened to the twins down the hall that were born too early. And when he spoke of love and fear as a father, his words wrapped all around me.
There are so many poems to dive into, there are so many poems to sit in.
For many ages, for the ages, this latest collection is yet another masterpiece, that I know I will return to again and again.
#Pernillerecommends #Bookstagram #Poetry #Teaching #Library #Reading

What a beautiful collection of poems serving as an ode to his children and fatherhood. I found myself deeply moved while reading. Thank you for the honor to read and review it in advance of its release.

What a fantastic collection of poetry this is. Clint Smith manages to touch on topics ranging from the small joys of every day life (like double strollers or enjoying a quiet house after your kids go to sleep) to massive societal and systemic issues like police brutality, racism, gun control, and New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane. He captures so many emotions of parenthood, from nostalgia to awe, in a way that had me vigorously nodding in agreement many times. These will make you smile gently, furrow your brow in anger, and break your goddamn heart. I highlighted the crap out of this book because there were so many life-changing lines, but my favorites were "All at Once", "Trying to Light a Candle in the Wind", "In the Grocery Store You Are Wrapped Tightly onto My Chest", "Pangaea", "Here Nor There", "For Your First Birthday", "Cartography", "Coming Home", "Deceit", and "Punctuation".

This was superb. How fascinating for the reader, to see the experiences and interests and knowledge of the man who wrote How the Word Is Passed, this time writing poetry about family and fatherhood.

I don't love poetry, but I love Clint Smith, and now, when Clint Smith does poetry...I love that. Wow. Clint Smith just has a way of connecting any reader with any topic in any format. Read this. Read How the Word is Passed. Read literally anything and everything this man writes.

Thanks to @littlebrown for sending me an advance copy of Above Ground by Clint Smith, out 3/28!

I love Clint Smith. I use his TED Talk, The Danger of Silence, with my students and recommend his first book, How the Word is Passed, to any and everyone. So I’ve been anticipating the release of this poetry collection since I first heard about it in October of ‘22.

The epigraphs by his children were a fun touch that really set the tone, and I’m still thinking about the opening poem, “All at Once.”

I think it is remarkable to find a book of poetry written about fatherhood, let alone one written so clearly and movingly. Clint writes about his children, but also about the world and about the way in which his understanding of it has been reshaped by his children’s existence.

If you’re interested in reading more poetry, Above Ground is beautifully and accessibly written, and I encourage you to pick it up.

Everything Clint Smith writes is beautiful, and this collection of poetry is no exception. His thoughts on fatherhood are poignant and powerful, and something all parents can relate to. His poems about Hurricane Katrina are haunting and his memories of his family are beautiful. Highly recommend this collection!

I read “Above Ground” shortly after giving birth to my second child and it was healing in a way I can’t express. Smith poignantly documents coming into parenthood, living while Black in America, and seeming arbitrary experience with warmth, humanity, and a beauty that is unparalleled. “Above Ground” is hopeful and real. I look forward to sharing this with my students.

A beautiful book of poetry about Clint’s family, generations of love, the Black American experience, and humankind. His writing made time feel much slower and the universe feel much smaller. He wrote poems on topics like hurricane Katrina, police brutality, war, and school shootings- the things in life that make us frail and remind us that we are only human.

Absolutely gorgeous poetry collection that was not at all difficult to understand. Poetry can be tough because sometimes the author is saying something OTHER than what is simply written on the page. Not here. Smith's words are so clear but yet he is saying simple things with such a beauty to his words and phrases. He's talking about things that so many people can relate to and putting a gorgeous spin on them with his writing. I really liked this and I think it's the first poetry collection I've read where every single one of the poems made complete sense to me.

Clint Smith a brilliant writer, whether he’s writing poetry or prose (or Twitter posts about Arsenal football club, my personal favorite). I had high expectations for his latest poetry collection, Above Ground, and was nevertheless blown away. This collection is raw and real, with an emphasis on parenting that made me blubber throughout the slender volume. Beautiful, moving, and at time heart wrenchingly poignant. Above Ground is a must read.

Thank you to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Clint Smith’s Above Ground is a solid collection of poems overall, one that contains several poems that are gems in their entirety and several others that close particularly well even if the poem as a whole didn’t do much for me.

One’s reaction will also be determined by poetic preference. There’s more than a little Billy Collins here in the way the poems are often simple in structure and language and conversational in tone, without a lot of varying from that form. So if you like that sort of poetry, you’ll almost certainly finds lot to enjoy here and probably react even more positively to the collection as a collection. If, on the other hand, you prefer a bit more playfulness in language and structure, a bit more variation in terms of voice and style and obliqueness, language and metaphors/similes that startle more often than seem familiar, you’ll probably be closer to my response.

Most of the poems center on Smith as a new parent, either musing on the role or speaking directly to his child (late in the collection another child enters the story) or, in some of the more fun poems, speaking directly to an object of childhood, such as a newly-arrived baby swing. Other topics involve the world his child is born into (on a precipice of climate change, often violent, too often racist and misogynistic, and particularly for young black boys, unjustly dangerous), the many small pleasures of life for one attentive to such moments, and the inevitable loss that comes along with those pleasures.

The poems, as noted, are often simple in word choice, style, and structure, even if some of the themes are far more complicated, and I’d describe them almost more akin to line-broken prose than how I usually envision poetry, with less of the sound qualities, vivid imagery, startling turn of phrase, and originality of figurative language that I often seek out in poetry. And while there is absolutely a power in simplicity, I did find myself wishing for a bit more in a number of the poems, or a bit more variety in the collection as a whole. That said, as I said above, there are several stand-out poems, and many of them that were less strong in their beginnings and middle led to a powerful close.

Amongst my favorites were “Your National Anthem”, “For Willie Francis: The First Known Person to Survive an Execution by Electric Chair 1947” ((one of the very few to play with structure/space on the page), “Pangaea” (probably my favorite overall), and “The Drone”. Included in those that closed particularly well were “The First Time I Saw My Grandfather Cry”, “Coming Home”, “For the Doctor’s Record”, and “Tradition”.

“Pangaea” offers up the titular ancient continent as one of the stronger metaphors in the collection, and some lovely lines, such as “don’t we all/eventually return to something/we can lose ourselves inside of? Can we/blame the desert for missing the breeze/that tumbles across the grassland?” “Tradition”, meanwhile, powerfully evokes the and embodies the speaker’s dead father, closing with the moving recognition that “I don’t remember what the bread tasted/like, just that my father had put it on my plate.” Perhaps the funniest poem, yet one that comes with some bite, is “Gold Stars”, an imagined outing out with his children where he is constantly fêted, praised, and celebrated for being the kind of father to “babysit my children”, the kind who gets a “praise Jesus” for changing a diaper and PA recognition in a store, along with applause, a crown, and a buffet coupon, for “running errands alone with his children.” It’s a poem that, as I can attest to based on my own experience as a dad who stayed home with his child, is only slightly hyperbolic.

I enjoyed all of Above Ground even if it left me wanting a bit more in various ways. But if I have read other recent collections that have wowed me more or exhilarated me more with language or style, this is the collection I’d offer up to anyone who asks for recommendations for poetry “for someone who doesn’t read a lot of poetry.” And for those who do, there’s still a lot here to take pleasure in.
3.5

There is a weighty joy to these poems, a marveling at the sheer magic that is life, a tenderness and humor that floats even higher when balanced against the solemnity and anger toward tragedies both human and inhumane. Because the world is on fire, and we live in this history and in this future, but infant hiccups and toddler questions and moments of love and connection are miracles that come from this history and shape this future.

A tender, insightful, honest collection from the ever-talented Clint Smith. Every word is a treasure.

Thank you to the publisher for the advance review copy.

Above Ground is a fantastic starting point for anyone interested in getting into poetry. In this book, Clint Smith reflects on parenthood, lineage, and community. As someone familiar with Smith’s work, I knew I’d enjoy Above Ground but was still pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this for anyone who is a fan of Clint Smith’s work. Thank you to Netgalley and Little Brown & Co for the e-arc.

Clint Smith writes poems on how being the father of a child learning his first words, on the brink of questioning and discovery forces one to relearn the world to answer questions about dinosaurs and what sound a giraffe makes. By the time his son is two, his wife is pregnant again and the boy is introduced to his sister in the womb through the sounds heard against his mom’s belly.

Following Nikki Giovanni, Smith blends family histories from his own childhood occasionally with historical and contemporary issues as in his poem about a photo of George Floyd and his daughter.

A father of two prematurely born children, Smith is witness in a hospital preemies’ ward to sufferings touching other parents and children and by extension all of us. He draws invisible lines of connections, fingering a globe, and with the philosophical chestnut, if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there, does it make a sound, a sound he cannot hear any more than he can hear the sound a giraffe makes or the cries of baby not his own, smith shows us the preciousness of moments too important to let slip away.

Like Ross Gay, Clint Smith is a poet of found joy. Smith charts his personal joys of fatherhood and knowledge of the awesome universe shared anew through the experiences of growing children.
An awesome book, I thank NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for an advanced reader’s copy.

Given how wonderfully written How The Word Is Passed was, I was excited to read Smith’s newest book of poetry.

These poems reflect on the moments leading up to him becoming a parent for the first time, and then all the events following. As a parent, as a POC parent, as a person who struggles with all the anxiety that comes with POC parenting in today’s world, I appreciate this writing with everything I have. So insightful, emotional and at times painfully raw. The surrounding world felt dark when reading Prehistoric Questions, I cackled at Gold Stars, and I just loved all of it. The very first poem hooked me, and I had to revisit it a few times for a reread.

I will definitely be getting the hard copy once it’s out for my bookshelf.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In Above Ground, Clint Smith has created another beautiful collection of poetry, this one reflecting the thoughts, fears, joys, and wonders of parenting.

The stunning opening poem, "All At Once," sets the stage the rest of the collection by highlighting the tension between creation and destruction. From there, the collection touches on a series of moments in his life as a new parent--from first sonograms, to family dance parties, to playground mishaps. The poems focused on his children are often full of wonder (his and their) and humorous--the odes to baby swings, baby monitors, and strollers being particular cheeky.

As endearing as some of the poems focused on his young children are, others in the collection are quietly devasting. Through the eyes of a new parent, he examines post-Katrina New Orleans and all the aspects of his own childhood that were lost in and after the storm. In other poems, he steps into the perspective of fathers experiencing enslavement, police violence, and military drone strikes.

And as with Counting Descent, he is aware of his place within generations--now, nestled between those who came before him and his children in whom he sees the roots of the past. He ponders what his own father experienced in raising him, and what parenting styles of generations before have filtered down to him. He beautifully depicts the complexity of welcoming new lives into the world as we lose parents and grandparents. These poems pair wonderfully with those focused on nature and the massive, almost incomprehensible scale of time, generations, and evolution; in poems like "Look At That Pond," he considers the span of centuries in a single location and our place in a miraculous universe. In these stories most of all, he balances our ephemeral lives and enduring legacies, known histories and unknown futures.

Clint Smith is a wonderful talent and this collection is worthy of repeat reads. Highly recommend!

Some years ago (how long can I keep using “some”? I’ll keep pushing it) I was headed to the massive auditorium on campus to go to class when a friend texted me to tell me that I should try and stay after class – someone was going to be coming in and doing poetry. That’s when I first heard of Clint Smith – he was standing there, reciting some amazing poetry. For one reason or another, I didn’t cross paths with him in any meaningful capacity again. A friend would read his works here, I would see a tweet there. And then this.

A 5-star collection of poetry for sure. Dealing with a changing landscape, racial divides, social insecurities that feel beyond tired. But all of that gets pushed aside in a sense, magnified in another, all in accommodation of his newborn. The challenge of fatherhood, the love of a loyal wife, the look of adoration from a baby. Constant, back-to-back hitters with this one. Try and get your hands on a copy if you’re experiencing baby fever.

Some of my favourite poems:

- By Chance
- Ode to the Electric Baby Swing
- Your National Anthem
- This Is an Incomprehensive List of all the Reasons I Know I Married the Right Person
- Ode to the Bear Hug
- For the Doctor’s Record
- We See Another School Shooting on the News
- Ossicones
- Alarm

Thanks to Little, Brown and Company for the ARC.

This will undoubtedly be one of my top reads for the year. If you're afraid of poetry, do not let this book scare you. It is incredible and it is accessible and it is beautiful and heartbreaking. There are poems that will make you laugh (so many odes to lovely and funny tiny moments of parenting with heavy emphasis on cereal crumbs), there are some that will make you cry happy tears, and there are some that will make you cry scared tears- but throughout all of these emotions Clint Smith weaves threads of joy and hope and I just wanted to swallow this entire book whole and stitch it to my heart.

Of particular resonance to me (with a huge disclaimer that I am a white woman raising a white son and we do not have to contend with the realities that Smith and his children do) Smith nails the feelings of trying to raise a child in a society that is hell bent on sucking:

"But some days, I worry / that we are welcoming you into the flames / of a world that is burning. / Some days, I am afraid that I am / more kindling than water."

"I fear everything I cannot control / and know that I control nothing. / I am standing in a thunderstorm / attempting to shield you from / every jagged slice of yellow sky. / I am trying to inhale all the smoke / from this burning world while / asking you to hold your breath.

Smith tackles some very heavy topics- the failures that led to the catastrophic aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina, gun violence, racism, the arbitrariness of most things and the dumb luck that any of us land where we land ("...you come from a history that is arbitrary / and cloaked in luck—you come from a land- / mine that was two feet to the left— /you come from children who shared their bread when they didn’t have / to. You come from the parachute that didn’t open then did."), the stupidity of borders and war ("the drone renders itself celestial the drone scoffs at / sovereignty the drone asks what is a border if you can fly / right over it?")- but then he inserts moments of wonder such as dancing in the cereal aisle with an infant strapped to his chest. I probably highlighted more things than I left alone, there is just so much to love and learn in this book.

Anyway, loved the book if that wasn't clear, and I am so excited to keep going to back to it again and again.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy, I very happily preodered this book for myself and a friend after reading and encourage everyone to do the same!