This book features poetry at its most eloquent. In this long poem, Smith imagistically evokes birds and plants, physical torture, and human relationships as he delves into the meaning of words and ponders language itself. In this sometimes personal, sometimes documentary, work Smith references a wide range of subjects, including science, fishing, and other poets and artists -- Canadian and international. Themes that run throughout the book include death, food, and Smith's relationships with his father and his son. This sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, poetic work explores the possibilities and nuances of language, and seeks to find a form of expression outside of free verse and prose, with a meditative pace. Smith's tendency to dart in and out of ideas and concepts is delicately balanced by echoes and recurrences, and his quest to explore and expand, for himself, the possibilities of poetry.
Steven Ross Smith was born in Toronto and raised in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, Smith creates, records, and performs sound poetry. This is the fourth book in Smith's fluttertongue series. He currently lives in Saskatoon, SK.
"...so packed with detail, conjecture, allusion, beauty, worry, and fear -- the pressured surround -- that as one sentence invites recognition and even empathy, the next interrupts the reader from following the dark line Smith attempts to take on his family's mortality." -- Bill Robertson, The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Saturday, May 26, 2007.
"With fluttertongue 4, Ross Smith allows phrases to rub up against each other, fragments of conversations around a room, all building into a crescendo of illness and pain." -- Derek Beaulieu, Alberta View, June 2007.
