Reviews of American Daughters

  • " 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

Reviews of Biking Through the Stone Age

  • " VA Smith moves effortlessly back and forth through time, all while staying firmly rooted in the present. Her visits to the past are clear-eyed and nostalgic, without ever veering towards the sentimental; her glimpses of the future cut clear like a bell, never forgetting that each generation has their tradeoffs between sunkissed summers and toxic DDT trucks, or rivers filled with melting snow and sewage. The volume is linear yet interconnected: a child dressed in choir robes playing judge with a jury of nose-picking neighbors grows up to wield the law against a petulant ex-president; a father singing and snapping his fingers, bearing bakery treats for his family, is now an urn in a New Yorker tote. Each poem lays bear that existential tension: the promise of daily beauty and joy and the inevitability of decay - aged, withered toenails painted coral; orchids that refuse to bloom until, either through sheer force of will or sheer dumb luck, they do - or end up in the trash. The dead are here, and the grown, and the dying, and the unborn – we are never alone, and the past is always prologue, and Smith is always watching, always writing, always finding the truths waiting to be laid bare and the words that unlock them. "

    – Kate Dailey, editor from The Philadelphia Inquirer

  • " Smith has a genius for sensory observation--each page is rich with images: "greasy, yeasty bags" of snowflake rolls; "the sky turned navy purple;" orchids as "an O'Keefe parody of whorled lady parts;" "Canada geese weaving their southward skein." There is tenderness and humor here, and unflinching self reflection. I read the book through in one delicious sitting. When I picked it up later to read some poems out loud, I found myself in tears. How does she do that? "

    – Susan Barney Mathias, MS, Development in Women’s Health, Geisinger Medical Network, Emeritus

  • " I vacillated between the impulse to devour this slim volume in a single sitting and the desire to savor each poem. What a delight to chance upon a poet with such talent for finding beauty in the (seemingly) simple act of bearing witness. Smith observes life with an unwavering eye, pen poised to capture both the joys and struggles of this being human, deftly sidestepping the pitfalls of sentimentality and rancor. Just as I was hungering for a bit of variety in form, Section II of the book delivered with more structural experimentation but the same clear voice. What I loved about these poems above all was the evocative imagery: "Winged creatures our secular angels / trillions of Brood X cicadas surfaced / in days, tymbal organs thrumming from / Georgia to New York and westward, / eating, mating, aerating the soil, / their dead bodies dusted into nitrogen, / their prophecy: to reverse/ our damned dominion." I cannot wait to see more from this gifted poet! "

    – Rachael Rose, Attorney

  • " Biking Through The Stone Age has earned a place on my poetry bookshelf of collections I want to return to again and again. Transcendent lines like "my tender brain laid bare as a pumpkin to car tires" or "Oh! How I have loved houses more than husbands,..." made me shudder and laugh. While each poem is crafted with a different twist, her beautiful writing and passion take us along a wild journey of love and grief. I can't wait to read more from this brilliant poet. "

    – Jennifer B. Kahnweiler, PH.D., Certified Public Speaker and author of multiple books on introverts and leadership

  • " At once poignantly caressing and knife-edge sharp, VA Smith takes her readers on a breathtakingly real ride. The trip will leave you exhausted, yet deeply satisfied. "

    – ML Hartzler, Home Nurse