Stop Lying (Pitt Poetry Series) - Award-Winning Poetry Collection for Literature Lovers & Book Clubs
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SKU:43846291
Product Description
Stop Lying is Aaron Smith’s most personal and vulnerable work yet. Revolving around the death of the poet’s mother and how Smith, a gay man, faces his upbringing where his sexuality was viewed as sinful and unnatural, these poems plumb the complexities of what families say and choose not to say. How does one grieve when a relationship will forever remain unresolved? What does it mean to both regret and not regret one’s decisions? What if survival doesn’t look like what we’re told it should? This is the story of a poet pushing through present-day grief and the shame of the past to find the buried truths, the ones that are hardest to tell. AFTERLIFE Sometimes the hardest part is wondering if my mother died believing I would go to hell
Customer Reviews
Aaron Smith's fifth collection is a powerful, intense exploration of his family history in the years, weeks, months and even seconds leading up to and out from his mother's death. The irony of the title is that lying and the command to stop lying run throughout the entire book in almost equal parts. We tell ourselves lies and share lies when conditions or institutions make the truth too painful, and sometimes it's better, as he notes of his mother's near-hoarding, to draw "blue-ink dreams / for a two-dimensional life she wouldn't have to fill." A lot of Smith's characters draw or write out lives they imagine and desire, ultimately to be disappointed by the world, but what saves this collection from bleakness is his strong and well-honed gift for telling details, humor, and surprising contradiction. Start to finish, I couldn't put it down (and didn't).
