I've been unable to decide if the best way to describe this book is as punk gone agrarian or if the agrarians went punk and got some politics or if Gertrude Stein went eco or if thrash metal went intellectual or if Whitman rapped with Busta Rhymes and they both agreed to rap about a lot of small animals because that is suddenly where it's at. But whatever it is, Destruction of Man is like all of Abraham Smith's work something full of many many words and weirdness and tradition and it might also be prophecy. – Juliana Spahr, author of The Winter the Wolf Came Abraham Smith uses his words like a rhythmic sledgehammer upside the head. Brilliant stuff that merges poetry and performance art. – Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers Part song, part guttural wail into the American rural landscape, Destruction of Man is a breathtaking lyric that's as complex and heartbreaking as the country itself. Smith has long been a lauded preacher of the trees, praiser of the woods, but this is his finest work yet as he makes a new form to sing of both the beauty and the mess. – Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things Abraham Smith's Destruction of Man is a compass setting toward musics caught between the hungry teeth of vole and buried bone of river. It nestles a bloodline of tonked and battered rhyme while conjuring a clabbered American Karma into silos of riveted storm. Spackled with image and strung out like a laundry line of ghost furious prayer, this book will carry you wild when you surrender to its eddies and breaks. Dive head in and leave caution to the shore. – Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Olio.
