Room Tone

RESCHEDULED: Join us May 11th at 3pm for a poetry reading and book signing with author Vanessa Smith. Delving into the landscape of human experience, ROOM TONE, a debut poetry chapbook by Vanessa H. Smith invites readers to explore perception, love, and impermanence. A meditative imagination underscores these poems that are startling portraits of scenes from a woman’s life from childhood, marriage, motherhood, travels, illness, divorce, and the deaths of those around her.

Love and loss are strong themes in this book by a poet who is both a painter and a filmmaker. In “He Has Always Been a Bird—A History of Motherhood Finished,” a woman laments her son’s leaving home for the first time. In “To Where Dailyness,” the poet lists images from her childhood growing up in a household that is secretive and strange. “In the Hospital” depicts a woman as she listens to the voices of the nurses outside her room.

And “In My Mother in Law’s Shower,” a woman gently scrubs her  husband’s mother in her final days. “Her blue negligee/Waited at attention, Wildfire/That shower settled part of every family’s story—evidence/about how to miss all mothers as they wash away.”

Readers will relate to the panoply of life examined through Smith’s poetic imagery that is alternately lyrical, uninhibited, fiery and unexpected. An “uploaded anguish” ignites these poems, which are “illuminated by a ferocious sense of beauty and tragedy, converging in sublime insight,” writes Broughton Coburn, author of The Vast Unknown.