Back Off, Assassin! New and Selected Poems by Jim Smith brings together brand-new work and selections from poetry published between 1979 and 1998. Smith, as always, writes from the front, where the personal and the political face off. His new work adds Nibbles the dog, Canadian poetry icon bpNichol and the Chilean leader Salvador Allende to the large cast of characters who populate his earlier work Ñ Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Graham Bell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris Dewdney, Leonel Rugama, the baby Jim, his dog Arnie, Williams Blake and Burroughs, John Wayne and Robert Heinlein. Smith's project to personalize the political, and to politicize the intensely personal, has carried on over thirty years and is as vital and surprising as ever. While the name and location of the war may have changed (from Vietnam to a second war on Iraq), and while more friends, family and heroes have died, Smith refuses to forget Ñ or to stop reminding us of the delicate humanity we are in constant danger of losing.

Jim Smith’s last collection from Mansfield Press, 2009’s Back Off Assassin: New and Selected Poems, was long-listed for the 2010 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and hit #7 on the Chapters/Indigo 14 Best Poetry Books for National Poetry Month in 2010. During his visit with antipoet Nicanor Parra in Las Cruces, Chile, in February 2012, Nicanor assured him that traditional translation is treason. In 61 years, Smith has published some 15 books and chapbooks of poetry, run a small literary magazine and press, and gone to law school late. He lives in Toronto and litigates for a living.

Jim Smith's profile page

The key word in describing Smith's writing is adventurous. Everything from hypereconomic prose to contemporary epic poetry. His prose pieces are deceptively simple, his poetry daring and complex. His instincts are almost infallible.Ó (Kevin Connolly)