What Came Down in the Smoke

Suffused with the horror, humor, and magic of Wabanaki storytelling, What Came Down in the Smoke is, like a child left for dead in the snow who comes home with a beaver's tail, a book about survival. With vivid imagery and lyrical intensity, Hart weaves together fragments of the natural world with deeply personal reflections on grief, love, and the passage of time....Summer J. Hart's newest book pulses with life, its vivacity made more exhilarating and exquisite by how poised the poems are, too, on the brink of pain, loss, grief, vulnerability, and death. Correlatively, Hart's poetic voice throughout the book is-somehow, miraculously, all at once-as clamorous and insistent as the cry of a Valkyrie and as aching and tender as a nightingale's. Her turns of phrase are so surprising and fresh that one feels constantly, as one moves from line to line and page to page, as though one has stumbled on a scene of intimacy-two lovers furtively kissing or a mother nursing a tiny child to sleep-that does not belong to one, but an intimacy that one is allowed to witness, nonetheless. -Eleanor Johnston, author of Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism