Appetite is a book that explores our American Mythologies, particularly masculinity and film. Smith investigates our fascinations with the body, gender, and entertainment in poems that are critically observant, darkly funny, darkly angry, and, sometimes, heartbreaking.
Whether he is cataloging shirtless men in films and bad television, lyricizing the anxieties of childhood, or redrawing the lines of cultural membership, Appetite attacks its subjects with wit, candor, and compassionate intensity. These poems announce their presence with a style that is as beautifully wrought as it is provocative.
In the America of Appetite, the usual hierarchies are obliterated: the disposable is as valuable as the traditional, pop culture is on the same level as the sacred, and the pleasurable simultaneity of past and present are found in high art and the tabloid. Smith's work engages our contemporary moment and how we want to think of ourselves, while nodding to rich poetic, cultural, and personal histories.
Industry Reviews
'Appetite' is a book that feels important. In his direct account of what it's really like to confront our sexuality against the many unforgiving aspects of mainstream popular culture, Smith gives voice to a risky, forward-thinking intelligence, and a daring sense of humor. These poems stay conscious, secular, awake in the world. They make an argument for queer sensibility, and reach beyond austere notions of desire into truthful complication, exploring what it means to live among, and with, others. They challenge us; they mark us; they refuse to be safe.-- "Rain Taxi"
'Appetite' will leave you feeling like you've stepped around the block, laced into the life of a gay speaker looking both inward and outward.-- "Pittsburgh City Paper"
[A]s the title suggests - as the eponymous poem bears witness - [the book is] essentially about desire, in its purest form, the carnal drive that motivates him (us), the all-consuming temptation for which we're willing to risk everything.-- "Chamber Four"
[S]ubversively simple, startlingly subversive, indirect in its directness, evasive in the appropriate ways, bracketed in mystery, and filled with hunger. These are the poems I want to read.-- "Randall Mann, On the Seawall"
A bold and uncompromising confrontation with the body and its dangers, from the perspective of a gay male poet. In poems too urgent to take refuge in the decorousness that defuses many poems about desire, he writes with wit, smarts, and heart about the connections that all of us (queer or less queer) attempt to make using the precious and problematic vessels of our selves.-- "Urban Range"
I have been waiting for the follow-up to Aaron Smith's Blue on Blue Ground with tremendous interest, and Appetite delivers. These poems showcase Smith's compassionate intelligence with wit, joy, and lyric aplomb. Appetite is a book to live with, swoon over, and be chastened by. Give it to your friends. Give it to your enemies. This voice matters.-- "Tracy K. Smith"
Smith reveals his speaker's past, his preoccupations, his loves and hates and fears and loneliness--in short, his humanity. It is an admirable achievement, and the book is a very rewarding read.-- "NewPages Book Reviews"
The poems are immediate, intimate, astonishing in their unabashed candor, their wicked and insightful humor. This is another way of saying I laughed as hard as I cried, that I looked up from the book believing Aaron himself must be standing in the doorway or sitting in the next room. He was that close. I felt I knew him already, the way the best post-confessional poets can leap, fully embodied, from the page into our lives.-- "Lambda Literary"
