“Smith dismantles the boundaries among the lyric, travelogue, and philosophy in this hybridized collection. . . . As Smith shifts gracefully among locales, genres, and temporal moments, the text performs and enacts its apt title, questioning the extent to which any individual voice exists apart from a shared cultural imagination. . . . Smith’s volume considers history, violence, and subjectivity with compassion and remarkable insight.”

Publishers Weekly

“Bruce Smith makes poetry from not-poetry, art from not-art, in these savage songs where history clashes with ecstasy. From the central prose sequence of prison life in the Vietnam years to chants and curses of our own day, this Song of My Smashed Self mourns, accuses, confesses, and multiplies. Bruce Smith is writing fully political lyric, ‘patterns of the blast.’”

Rosanna Warren, author of Ghost in a Red Hat

“This is a book through which we can ride smoothly into a time, a place, its passions and terrors; however, when you glance in the rearview mirror you see that the gravel has been churned up by your traveling at such speed, that you’ve left Earth with this poet, that you are not where you expected to be, but you are where you never doubted you should be going.”

Laura Kasischke, author of Space, In Chains