Be Recorder, Graywolf
Shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award
Be Recorder offers readers a blazing way forward into an as yet unmade world.
The many times and tongues in these poems investigate the precariousness of personhood in lines that excoriate and sanctify. Carmen Giménez Smith turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it. This reckoning with self and nation demonstrates that who and where we are is as conditional as the fact of our compliance: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.” Be Recorder is unrepentant and unstoppable, and affirms Giménez Smith as one of our time’s most vital and vivacious poets.
Praise for Be Recorder
“As she documents a range of subjects — including reality TV, capitalism and the exploitation of immigrant workers — Smith questions how an individual’s experiences are shaped by the dominant culture and how to push back.”—The Washington Post
“With a powerful allegiance to the freedom of free verse, Smith tells a sort of fragmentary superhero origin story about a girl who faces the disdain of her country to become a woman, poet, and mother.”—NPR.org
“Be Recorder is necessary reading for our dark times. The collection reminds us of the rich, interconnected histories between both Americas, North and South, the one we live in and the one we wish we lived in.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Bold and unapologetic, this collection is everything poetry needs to be in our age of hateful, anti-intellectual race-baiting: deeply thoughtful, urgently provocative, and endlessly imaginative.”—Booklist
