Austin Smith – författare

A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as “memorable” (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and “impressive” (Chicago Tribune)Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop.In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled “The Light at the End,” suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.Building on Smith’s reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world.

The "memorable" (Stephanie Burt, Yale Review) and "impressive" (Chicago Tribune) debut from a remarkable new voice in poetryAlmanac is a collection of lyrical and narrative poems that celebrate, and mourn the passing of, the world of the small family farm. But while the poems are all involved in some way with the rural Midwest, particularly with the people and land of the northwestern Illinois dairy farm where Austin Smith was born and raised, they are anything but merely regional. As the poems reflect on farm life, they open out to speak about childhood and death, the loss of tradition, the destruction of the natural world, and the severing of connections between people and the land.This collection also reflects on a long poetic apprenticeship. Smith''s father is a poet himself, and Almanac is in part a meditation about the responsibility of the poet, especially the young poet, when it falls to him to speak for what is vanishing. To quote another Illinois poet, Thomas James, Smith has attempted in this book to write poems "clear as the glass of wine / on [his] father''s table every Christmas Eve." By turns exhilarating and disquieting, this is a remarkable debut from a distinctive new voice in American poetry.From Almanac:THE MUMMY IN THE FREEPORT ART MUSEUMAustin SmithAmongst the masterpieces of the small-townPicassos and Van Goghs and photographsof the rural poor and busts of dead Greeksor the molds of busts donated by the ArtInstitute of Chicago to this dyingtown''s little museum, there was a mummy,a real mummy, laid out in a dim-litroom by himself. I used to goto the museum just to visit him, a pharaohwho, expecting an afterlifeof beautiful virgins and infinite foodand all the riches and jewelshe''d enjoyed in earthly life,must have wondered how the hellhe''d ended up in Freeport, Illinois.And I used to go alone into that roomand stand beside his sarcophagus and say,"My friend, I''ve asked myself the same thing."

"There is little credibility in healing a privileged world. If the Church is failing the powerless of this world, it is failing the Gospel totally."

In 1971, two priests from a Catholic order left their monastery in order to reinvent the contemplative life amid a Liverpool community oppressed by poverty and systemic racism. Foreshadowing the ''new monastic'' movement, the members of a 300-year-old religious order began to translate the radical, self-sacrificial values of monastic living into an open, hospitable, practical life on the margins of society.

Passion for the Inner City is a probing spiritual reflection on the first twelve years of Austin Smith''s life in the inner city. He describes a new model of faith-not just giving up his possessions, but letting go of assumptions, dependencies, all his rationalisations-until he sees the poorest in society outside of his own agendas. By living and suffering alongside them, he calls out the deep offensiveness of the inequality we daily permit.

With stories, insights and reflections, Passion for the Inner City is a fascinating account of ''old'' monasticism embracing the challenges of the present, and also a trove of wisdom and challenges that still have sharp questions to ask anyone pursuing their faith today.

"I have gone on marches in the inner city; I have fought for better housing; I have been part of the struggle for better education for our children; I have stood on the street in riots; I have been part and parcel of the struggle for community power; I have set my face against my own racism and the racism of others. Why? Because I believe where creation is sinned against, where human beings suffer, Jesus is being crucified."