John Myers - this verse novella offers us a map to a borderless and psychedelically rural landscape--poems begin and end without notice, and the titular characters, Smudgy and Lossy, fade in and out of the rustic settings, situations, and daily chores that Myers assigns to them

John Myers, Smudgy and Lossy, The Song Cave, 2018.              




SMUDGY AND LOSSY, the first collection of poetry by Idaho-based poet John Myers, offers us a map to a borderless and psychedelically rural landscape--poems begin and end without notice, and the titular characters, Smudgy and Lossy, fade in and out of the rustic settings, situations, and daily chores that Myers assigns to them, "look[ing] for delicate flowers that bloom through hard sand or clay." With an expansive and textured queerness covering each page, the flat horizons of these poems sit too far away to navigate their identity with any certainty. Building continuously toward the collection's final swirling 13 pages, a 127-line list poem leaves us with one of the most exciting and bewildering poetic finales in recent memory.



"Both in the characters and the way the poems emote, I become 'wrapped in' John Myers's exquisite collection of poems SMUDGY AND LOSSY; their 'roaring and wandering' lyrics that might wear 'out a blue rectangle.' I am enamored with the style: poems that hold the lyric and its reproof, granting me more of their intensity. The poems scorn and celebrate--with equal gusto--feelings and attitudes that shift, deepen, and advise. The poems hold the imagination in front of the image, glossing-over or rusting the poem's sentiment. Take for example the poem 'Lossy,' which opens with 'laugh gorgeous and laugh shy.' Does it instruct or describe? Both. And the other poems, too, are just as gorgeous and shy. In the end these poems reveal only what they intend: to loom 'beyond Eros and ferns.'"--Prageeta Sharma


Taking the form of a verse novella, this finely crafted debut from Myers charts the narrative arc of a romance between recurring characters Smudgy and Lossy. Sonically rich and highly musical, the work considers the transformative effects that desire has on the way people inhabit language, but also the ways that language structures interpersonal intimacy. “I’m learning to speak,” Smudgy declares midway through the book, gesturing at the revolution in grammar and address that readers experience in Myers’s lyric style. Frequently eschewing the semantic meaning of words and relying on sound as the primary source of unity within the work, Myers reminds readers that desire calls for its own lexicon, one that defamiliarizes and unsettles: “You are the conscience I exaggerate,/ devastating your brambles.” Both here and throughout, Myers presents words that fit together syntactically but do not conceptualize meaning or narrative in an expected way. He shows that speech is inevitably an act of homage and destruction: “If languages are birds to be captured, or butterflies in the killing jar.” For Myers, part of the process of transformation, in both language and interpersonal relationships, is the destruction of old models, a necessary devastation that makes way for the new: “I keep only one book, this one/ I made.” - Publishers Weekly


John Myers on an untitled poem from Smudgy and Lossy:
We both run
orchards out

our minds but I
want to see

you smile again
the way you

do it in
the mush. Such

as referring
to my grope

as gold in
unison

these times I
feel luck hard

as a caramel.

Or be reminded. Once I realized I could belong I felt freer. We have a practice of writing down our dreams on sheets of butcher paper first thing every morning. I'm interested in the recognition of someone else's as one's own.
I wanted to write into that pleasure. You might be interested to know the manuscript was called Cider Kit for a while. Apples came up a lot. But first I had to remind myself what it was to be a peer.
I found Halt Cribbing provoked intimacy. It was my first time west of anywhere, I had just quit smoking, and I had a past as a developmental biology research assistant. In hardware stores there was hot popcorn. The varieties stunned me.
Smudgy and Lossy was gathered in Montana and re-elected in Arizona. I was happy to go back to the basement of Double Front Chicken in Missoula and up the dry creek beds of Sabino Canyon in Tucson. I'm grateful to my teachers and colleagues in the MFA program at the University of Montana. They are here in this book hard.
Now we live in Idaho, not far from Stanley Hot Springs, where I heard ruckling what I later learned were grouse and tasted my first ghost. In the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness was where this untitled poem found me. November or so, 2010. I felt thrilled.
There are fairies there in the moss around the springs, which takes half a day to hike to. Longer in winter. One crosses a river and sees across the river scree. To have moved from thinking about poems as finished things, this untitled poem was written while in the early stages of falling in love with my partner Brian. - https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/Myers/