The Death Metal Pastorals

By Ryan Patrick Smith

The Death Metal Pastorals turns over the rolling green hills of the idyllic American landscape, excavates their violences, and attenuates the powers that live atop them. In Ryan Patrick Smith's pastoral, " nothing works here but blood & radio" and from page one, we know we're entering a landscape at once more ominous and more vigilant than anything conjured by Spencer, Drayton, or Marlowe.
Smith's poems upend the topography of the pastoral setting, peering through a " burning crop of disease" to ask, " Where am I in the field that I give my will over to you?" Through a range of personas, from death metal swains to The Terminator' s Sarah Connor to Mister Rogers to a smartphone camera at a Black Lives Matter protest, Smith casts a piercing eye to the destructive structures of consumption, gendered violence, and white supremacy. As we enter this highly charged pastoral terrain, far from the bucolic or picturesque, we're asked to inhabit these structures and then to work to live beyond them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1625578075
• ISBN13: 9781625578075
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
• Length: 30 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.3" x 8.3"