COMING UP NEXT: Adaptations
Release date: September 23, 2025
Publisher: Green Writers Press
AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER SOON
ADVANCED PRAISE FOR ADAPTATIONS
VA Smith swirls and rocks her readers inside fields of grassy waves, across beaches dotted with moon jellies, and into the eye of a of dung beetle navigating by stars. In a world altered by climate, time, or chance, Smith’s lyric searches for a foothold: for “lungs lush with language, / bodies’ rhythm sprung, hearts pumping / with metaphor’s grace—// to make new things both disparate, the same.” These poems are remarkable, stunning in form, language, and insight into adaptations.
— Dawn Terpstra, Head, Iowa Poetry Association, author of Songs from the Summer Kitchen (2021)
With an ear for the lyric and the absurd in human action––scraping off cancers, visiting a son in prison, attending a Zoom funeral––the speaker of VA Smith’s Adaptations also reaches for a less human-centric way of being. Mulling over “this late lust for transformation” and “how autocracy happened here,” these poems root themselves in a time of rapid collapse––of ecosystems, species, and democracies––and propose, “Let’s slip our skin this New Year, / change our species.” In Smith’s Adaptations, I find a companion for change.
–– K.A. Hays, author of Anthropocene Lullaby (2022)
From quiet domestic scenes to sweeping ecological meditations, VA Smith’s Adaptations traverses personal grief, cultural reckoning, and environmental crisis, always returning to the question of how we endure and evolve. The poems in this collection are anchored in the intimate experiences of love and friendship, but they also reach outward to myth, to art, and to the intricacies of a changing world…Smith’s voice is unflinching, often playful, always honest. . . steadfast in its commitment to bearing complicated witness. . . . Drawing on a wide range of literary, scientific, and visual art references, these poems are intellectually daring and heartfelt, and they both challenge us and invite us to imagine survival as a shared, ethical act. The closing sonnet crown, inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene, urges us to imagine resilience not just for ourselves, but also for the more-than-human world that we inhabit.
— Troy Urquhart, editor, Willows Wept Review
American Daughters
Paperback: 82 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (January 7, 2023)
“In Virginia Smith’s remarkable journey across continents, states, and centuries, she gives us poetry that gives back some of what has been taken. This is, at its heart, a collection about home, with a wide definition that encompasses the whole of the human experience, uniting those experiences in America: the ideal, the place, and the real. Layers of carefully chosen images build different, intersecting worlds, and bring them home, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Joni Mitchell, from pierogies to Prosecco, from Ru Paul’s Drag Race to The Invisible Man, from Covid quarantine to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Virginia embodies the voices of her sisters across America to look through their eyes, and she tells it like it is.”
—Lorette C. Luzajic, artist, writer, editor, The Ekphrastic Review
In American Daughters, VA Smith channels the voices of women who bear witness to losses and gains and sustains the empathy required to imagine the lives of others. Smith recognizes that with this collection she has taken risks: to inhabit other identities—even as poetic personae—is to poke the bear of cultural appropriation. It seems a worthwhile risk: the voices she creates are unexpected and undefeated. In her world of West Elm wedding gifts and crumbling Kharkov apartment balconies, Smith curates women’s experiences through keen observation and compassion in a poetry of witness—as if she has witnessed them all.
—Deborah Fries, author of The Bright Field of Everything, 2014, Montgomery County Poet Laureate, 2006
Smith’s American Daughtersis a jewel box of female speakers, rich and dynamic and alive and fraught. They nurse grudges and find joy, break hearts and take care, each one a complete person laid psychologically bare through Smith’s tight stanzas and sharp turns of phrase. There’s the neurodivergent librarian who seeks peace among her plants—and on stage. The ex-missionary who now finds “holiness only in things of this world”—bike rides, activism, and threesomes. Smith reminds us that these women—like all women—have shame and pleasure and secrets of their own. It's one last grace note in a collection that sings with full force.
—Kate Dailey, editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer
Biking Through The Stone Age
Paperback: 58 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (May 4, 2022)