ABOUT BALTIMORE SONS

Shotguns boom, unsettling the air between us. My eyes stay open.

With the city of Baltimore as his backdrop, accomplished poet, author, and editor Dean Bartoli Smith offers a wrenching examination of our troubled attachments to place and the deepest wounds of the American psyche. Frank, unsparing, often violent and disturbing, these poems speak in the voice of a young man trying to navigate the city he loves as he lives in the long shadow of its decline with a sense of grace and hope.

PRAISE FOR BALTIMORE SONS

“Laced with diversity and stories of inner-city violence, readers who enjoy serious poetry would enjoy this book.”
—Manhattan Book Review

“‘Why do roses die?’ Why indeed, other than to be reborn in these tough, spare, and ultimately grace-filled poems.”
—Moira Egan, author of Synaesthesium

“The word ‘home’ conjures warmth and domesticity, a good life worth fighting for. But in Baltimore Sons, home is more complex: a landscape of harrowing childhood memories set against a city wracked by gun violence, drugs, and riots. To navigate such a place—and to lovingly raise a family in the midst of chaos—is today's almost insurmountable problem. This is why we need a poet like Dean Smith, who, if not fully reconciling love and damage, charts a clear-eyed path for those who long to be at home in the world with a survivor’s sense of grace, acceptance, and wisdom." 
—Richard Jones, editor of Poetry East 

“Filled with the volatile heat of a loaded gun, these poems astound and transform us."
—Crystal Simone Smith, author of Dark Testament 

“Always the threat of violence looms among these lines, but also beauty, love, and even joy. Even hope.”
—Gerry LaFemina, author of Graffiti Heart

“Baltimore Sons is a wounded, hopeful promise to a city, the pages a stage for heroes, victims, survivors and—in honor of their losses—an argument for a better future, seen through the poet’s story. There is a shimmering nostalgia, arrested for a moment of greatness under a spiraling football in the klieg lights, and there is the raw, useless loss in the electric glare of a restaurant, a chef gunned down in a robbery on his way to a midnight shift. Notes taped to poles and diner windows call out the city’s fallen, the random casualties fueled by poverty and crime.”
—Bruce Craven, author of Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones

“Bursting with vitality, truth, and gunfire, it’s a succinctly relevant American book.” 
—Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Bartoli Smith is a published author, poet, and freelance journalist.

His poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Open City, Beltway, The Pearl, The Charlotte Review, The Cultural Studies Times, Gulf Stream, and Upstreet, among others. His book of poems, American Boy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 2000) won the 2000 Washington Writer's Prize and was awarded the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001 for the best book published by a Maryland writer over the past three years. He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season (Temple University Press, 2013).

Smith’s fiction has appeared in Minimus, The Loch Raven Review, The Patuxent Review, and Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore. His prose has appeared in the Best American Poetry blog, Jambase, Patch.com, Zocalo Public Square, The Baltimore Brew, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine, The Catholic Review, Indiewire, and the Woodstock Independent.

Smith received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in 1989. He is an adjunct professor of publishing in the Masters in Professional Studies program at George Washington University and the director of Duke University Press. One of his all-time favorite moments was doing a public talk with John Cleese.

Find him online at:
@NeverEasy921