from Report from the Smith Society, Vol. 1 No. 1
I love her for knowing every writer needs to begin with an apocryphal text. And that this text must live in the liminal space between legibility and imagination—which is to say, it must live in the outhouse of time, or our attempts to tame it. Like daybooks—not diaries so much as spaces in which the unsettledness of time obfuscates the hope of planning, or the day itself. Smith gives us these books about a traumatic experience which occurred in the context of teaching, but the tendrils of day, the fixedness of the date. I love her for writing a poem titled “In Love” that ends “All the girls walk like zombies / down the street. / I see them, like me, / negotiating the gap between / memory and reality, / blocking the incessant intrusions, / fighting to stay present.” There is something of the mordant in her person as well as her method. I should define my terms. As a plural noun, mordants refers to substances, typically inorganic oxides, that combine with a dye or stain and thereby fix it in a material. Smith has dabbled in mordants, and used them in How to Know the Flowers. But mordants can also be used as a verb—to say, for example, she mordants the poems in relation to the flowers—and this verb form is defined to to impregnate or treat (a fabric) with a mordant. To “impregnate or treat”...what a fantastic corpus she gives us—and what a patriarchal mordure she repudiates with every multivalent line.
Alina Stefanescu
was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and
several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald
(Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering
Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every
Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s
poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North
American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry,
BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as poetry editor
for several journals, reviewer and critic for others, and Co-Director of PEN
America’s Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like
creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.