Drawing on nine previous collections and including nearly fifty new poems, Charlie Smith’s I Am Your Lifeguard marks the return of one of our most honest and unorthodox poets. The poems in this collection expose jagged truths: some are love letters; some focus our attention on beauty we may have otherwise missed, stepped over or cast aside; some tell us secrets we may want to carry in a locket; some are x-ray readings of our hearts; some are laugh-out-loud funny; some are quiet revelations. Each one is a prism through which Smith refracts and reflects the experience of consciousness, such as “No Nonsense,” in which he writes that “I came / away from myself / unstuck / and a sort of translucent orderliness / like a small herd of gazelles / entered my mind.” The cascade of imagery, observation, and revelation that characterizes Smith’s work imbues the collection with an expansive, radical compassion. It “remind[s] us . . . we don’t really know what beauty is until we’ve looked hard at the horror that throws beauty into bright relief” (David Kirby, New York Times Book Review).I Am Your Lifeguard is prophetic and prescient, exquisitely descriptive of what it means to be human, and astonishingly attentive to beauty found even in the most derelict places. This collection is a stunning retrospective from an award-winning writer of “scalding aortal brilliance” (New York Times Book Review).
