I recently finished reading a pdf of Zac Smith’s latest collection, Everything is totally fine. The book itself doesn’t come out till later this year, but I urge you to check it out.
Whether you’d call the works therein flash or micro fiction, short stories or prose poetry, you’re in for a treat. At turns surreal, crass, enlightening and confounding, Smith’s writing is something else. His lines pack a punch, chock full of the curious and the mundane; sexual desires and foibles (base & bizarre); onomatopoeia and graphic violence (both hilarious & disturbing); basically, the multitudes that Whitman espoused, given contemporary form via online (ie. “cyber”) writing (a term, I’m given to believe, Smith himself had some hand in coining—or maybe I made that up? The web is wide, its eddies & currents often difficult for me to navigate).
Consider, for example, the following passage, which constitutes about half of the piece titled “Tree”:
Some work at the factories near the lake, some at the diners downtown, some at the elementary school. We watch the baby chicks grow up and start families and move into new trees. We watch others enlist in the army, fight in the war, take selfies with corpses in a burned-out jungle, come back blind or mutilated or unceasingly angry. We watch them dig graves, burn bodies, rub blood on the tree limbs. They build massive edifices of wicker and bone among the leaves. We hear the birds cry out at night in agony and fear. They scream all night—it’s terrible, just a horrible noise. My God, I’m so sick of this fucking tree.
Some apt images, eh? I dig it. What the heck are those birds up to up there anyways, if not something like this?
Or how about this humdinger, from “Everything is Totally Fucked 4”:
I think I will drive my car off the road without noticing. I will spend several hours thinking about the best way to spell the sound of the car crash, and I won’t ever know how to spell it right, and then I’ll be dead. No, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Everything is totally fine.
Have you ever spent time weighing the pros and cons, both price & effect, of slightly different sizes of booze available, such as Smith does here in “I Am Going to Burn Down the Mall of America”? You & me both, good buddy!
They have 22s of stuff, which we could drink faster, but it’s not a good deal, we’d rather get two forties than four twenty-twos. You call out to the cashier and ask which beer is best to drink in a bathroom but he just gives a thumbs up, which isn’t helping anything, but it’s helping the mood, which I guess is something, which is good, yeah. Feels like we can do this.
In “The Woman Doing Some Kind of Workout Routine Near the Bleachers,” Smith captures the daily routine of many parents of young children. Having spent all day every day with my two kids for the past two months, and four straight months last year, during this never-ending pandemic, I felt this one in my bones.
The man looked at his phone. He thought about how much time it’d take to walk home and how much time it’d take to cook dinner. He thought about cooking dinner every night except for Friday night for an indefinitely long time, probably decades.
Now, I don’t know a lot about Zac Smith. He’s a bit of a man of mystery, to me at least. He’s involved in Back Patio Press, which has been kind enough to run with two of my stories in the past year, and that the poetry of his I’ve seen hits the right spot for me, too. If anything you’ve read here floats your boat, pick this gem up, and let his writing do the talking—could be your kinda thing.
Next week, I should have something new for you. In the meantime, enjoy.