ABOUT BALTIMORE SONS

Shotguns boom, unsettling the air between us. My eyes stay open.

With the city of Baltimore as his backdrop, accomplished poet, author, and editor Dean Bartoli Smith offers a wrenching examination of our troubled attachments to place and the deepest wounds of the American psyche. Frank, unsparing, often violent and disturbing, these poems speak in the voice of a young man trying to navigate the city he loves as he lives in the long shadow of its decline with a sense of grace and hope.

“‘Why do roses die?’ Why indeed, other than to be reborn in these tough, spare, and ultimately grace-filled poems.
—Moira Egan, author of Synaesthesium

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Bartoli Smith is a published author, poet, and freelance journalist.

His poetry has appeared in Poetry East, Open City, Beltway, The Pearl, The Charlotte Review, The Cultural Studies Times, Gulf Stream, and Upstreet, among others. His book of poems, American Boy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 2000) won the 2000 Washington Writer's Prize and was awarded the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001 for the best book published by a Maryland writer over the past three years. He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season (Temple University Press, 2013).

Smith’s fiction has appeared in Minimus, The Loch Raven Review, The Patuxent Review, and Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore. His prose has appeared in the Best American Poetry blog, Jambase, Patch.com, Zocalo Public Square, The Baltimore Brew, Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine, The Catholic Review, Indiewire, and the Woodstock Independent.

Smith received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in 1989. He is an adjunct professor of publishing in the Masters in Professional Studies program at George Washington University and the director of Duke University Press. One of his all-time favorite moments was doing a public talk with John Cleese.

Find him online at:
@NeverEasy921