Readable and inviting, Spatial Relations reminds us of the power in everyday places and objects and the mysterious space between them. Like the fold-up shapes in old junior high school aptitude tests, they are both concrete and bewildering. The characters and personae in these poems, including mythologized versions of Smith's parents, yearn for big emotions, for high living, for what they have tasted and touched, loved and lost.
This is a book that will invite you to remember, imagine and laugh more often than you might expect. The poems in this collection have a rueful, lively sense of humor, an underlying impatience with social inequity, and a willingness to imagine that things might be playing themselves out differently in some parallel universe. Like anyone who has narrowly escaped a life of domestic confinement, these poems have a wild streak.
