About the Author

Rad Smith, born in 1947, grew up in Minnesota, and attended Harvard, where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop. He worked in high-tech for 15 years, then abandoned that to become a stay-at-home dad and write poetry. In 1998, he learned he was in the final stages of lung cancer, although he never smoked. Working feverishly, he finished this manuscript before he died in December of that year.

Advanced Praise:

“When I first read the poems of Rad Smith, I wrote his widow: ‘As you might imagine, I have seen many manuscripts by people whom I have not known, and over the last fifty years I have read thousands and thousands of poems in manuscript. There is only one other occasion when I read a collection with so much enthusiasm.’ We have lost a precious maker, losing Rad Smith.” —Donald Hall

Bookslut has handed Distant, Early Warning a long, thoughtful and truly extraordinary review. In the opening paragraph, Jason Rotstein writes:

Like musicians, poets are best known to the general population through single poems in anthologies, so one, two, maybe three meditations of a defining nature is all we expect from a good, purchasable collection. Still, occasionally — perhaps, rarely — there is a poet who raises the bar; a poet who has less of the “thriller” or filler and more of the phantastic; a poet who manages to place a collection full of great poems. Such is the case with Rad Smith.

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-28-6