Joan Silber says the “series of three” in fairy tales is “a clear form of narrative argument.” The third wish has the highest stakes in that argument. It’s your last chance to make good on your gifts, to do the right thing, to truly change. Now that I’m in my late forties, and seeing my “third wish” era ahead, I find it a mysterious, wonderful, and alarming stage to consider.
Judge Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Deaf Republic, writes of Smith's work, "Jasmine Elizabeth Smith knows what a sense of place is, what history is, how much pain it inflicts–and how a well-told story can lift us up, despite everything. But perhaps even more important, here is a new poet who knows how to sing like no one else."
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"'Carrion Comfort' is music; it is magic; it is my old companion during the long dark nights I lie sleepless and wracked with hopelessness, clinging to the poem as evidence that another soul has met the struggle and come out of it burning, come carrying a beauty so dazzling it is hard to look at directly."
