Local Author Celebration Series: Abraham Smith and Steve Timm
Please be our guest for our next local author talk featuring Abraham Smith and Steve Timm
Where: Carriage House at Joslyn Castle & Gardens (3902 Davenport Street, Omaha, NE 68131)
When: Friday, October 4 from 6pm-7pm (doors open at 5:30pm)
What: A FREE all ages event.
About our Authors:
Abraham Smith was raised around Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and lives in Ogden, Utah, where he is associate professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at Weber State University. His recent poetry collections include Insomniac Sentinel (Baobab Press, 2023) and Dear Weirdo (Propeller Books, 2022). Away from his desk, Smith improvises poems inside songs with the Snarlin' Yarns: thesnarlinyarnsut.bandcamp.com.
Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel is a concatenation of sandhill cranes and their haunting deep time dinosaur barking. It is the croon of safety from the heart of Wisconsin. It is an aegis from the violence perpetuated on the young; that the young perpetuate; lurching and launching from tercets, those familiar island letting go sideways, the poems themselves as steady and desultory as sand and people and the places they abide. Insomniac Sentinel is a collision of meter, speed, and experience into auditory sensations that range from the elegiac to the ecstatic to the venomous in Smith’s nuanced considerations of blue-collar America. Mirroring the attentions of Midwest arrhythmia in the music of the sandhill cranes, Insomniac Sentinel resonates on temporal frequencies, waves ancient and contemporary, rolling from the throats of giants.
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Steve Timm is the author most recently of Ornithocracy (Stone Corpse Press, 2024) and Rule of Composition: 100 Poems Written to the Cecil Taylor Feel Trio’s 2 Ts for a Lovely T (Bananaquit Press, 2022). About an earlier book, Joan Retallack blurbed “Steve Timm’s word spectrum is brave, unnerving, dazzling, commodious... [and] unyieldingly good naturedly plays with an impressive number of entrenched expectations.” He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Shari Bernstein, and son, Alex (who finds his poems “interesting”).
Many new and old poems can be found across the internet and in print journals (e.g., American Poetry Review). His live performances are known for ending with an improvised sound poem.
