Down to Earth, by Crystal Simone Smith

There’s such intimacy and such depth of feeling in Crystal Simone Smith’s remarkable book, Down to Earth that one could almost overlook the incredible formal rigor that also guides and holds these poems. Where a lesser poet would make an airless box, Smith uses her deep understanding of both human and poetic form to make a world. People live, love, and struggle within the formal confines of a brutal world that is also luminous beyond all our expectations. I aspire to Smith’s mastery of line and clarity of vision. In this book, the past is always rising up to meet us and remind us that the past really isn’t past at all. We are always making and remaking it. -Gaby Calvocoressi