Flying Red Horse is a book of poetry, with a lyric essay, about fatherhood and masculinity, and the conditions of whiteness that pressure those terms for contemporary relevance and meaning. It looks at the precarity of relationships between people and place in diverse geographic and racial contexts; it addresses the crisis of climate change; and it considers parental connections to children in uncertain global circumstances.This book speaks to an experience of Canada and the United States, drawing attention to the conditions of spectacle and surveillance governing each nation. It asks where we stand in relation to the global technological power of connectivity and disconnection that disturbs contemporary social relations. Without seeking resolution, Flying Red Horse puts in correspondence four episodes of poetic meditation on the disparate facts composing the contemporary moment through the personal encounter of lyric language.

A poet and literary scholar, Dale Martin Smith was born in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. He is the author of the full-length poetry collections Slow Poetry in America (2014), Black Stone (2007), and American Rambler (2000). Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (2012) and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both 2017), for which he received Simon Fraser University’s Charles Olson Award. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, 1998-2004. Smith joined the faculty of English at Ryerson University, Toronto, in 2011.

Dale Martin Smith's profile page

"What is lyric’s relation to history, to a public today? In this poetry – the impossible heart beating intensities through every human murmur and whisper that manages to lift itself up into song into solace. In this poetry, the deep neon glow of America visible from across fake nations’ lines, pulsating broken geographies, rent histories, torn earth. Deep gratitude to Dale Smith for willing more beauty and more tenderness into the world."—Stephen Collis

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"In lines of great lyric discernment with an eye to atrocities of the past in the present, Dale Smith reimagines the song form as our consummate equipment for living. Flying Red Horse confirms his breathtaking artistry that – insofar as any time of innocence is over – holds at once a place, an exhortation, a persevering, a reverie, a promise."—Roberto Tejada

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