Overview

The capstone of a distinguished literary career, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems is Baron Wormser's eleventh book of poetry. It speaks to matters that have haunted and obsessed the author for a lifetime-especially the ways that a finite poem can intersect with the infinitude of being. The book is arranged like a work of fiction, with titled chapters and with single poems of a personal nature standing between each chapter-a thread woven throughout the book. Each chapter reflects themes of longstanding concern: the duality of masculine and feminine, political history, literary progenitors, prophetic voices, and the ways people struggle with the circumstances in which they find themselves. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once noted that poetry is ""an impossible art."" In this collection, Baron Wormser reflects on what he has learned about that art over the course of a lifetime-an inspiring but also chastening experience. ""Poetry is useful in giving complexity its due,"" the author says, because we live in an age of drastic reductionism, characterized by violent rhetoric, blind partisanship, fake news, and outright lying-forces that militate against imaginative reflection and the empathy that can grow out of that reflection. Here are poems that seek to braid thought and feeling-this but also that-poems that register the thrill of being but also linger and provoke, long after they've been read.

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9781639822171

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Reviews

Among poets, Baron Wormser stands as our preeminent narrator of souls. ""Tell me what is human,"" one speaker entreats, and these poems-imaginatively inhabited, historically informed, psychologically probing-aim to do just that. Like the movies evoked throughout this book, they offer penetrating close-ups, poignant scenes, and indelible voices as they unreel in time, illuminated and illuminating. Drawing on poetic resources that have grown deeper and ever more surprising over five decades, Wormser urges us to look into the maw of time and see. . . . I, for one, cannot look away.Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Lessons with ScissorsI was a greenhorn magazine editor in the late seventies when I became aware of Baron Wormser's nonpareil gifts. I saw how he blended one of the most impressive intellects I would ever encounter with stunning lyrical gifts, producing poetry that- without the least affectation or self-vaunting- saw to the very core of human existence and, for all humanity's evils and foibles, insisted on finding what he names ""beauty and fractured love."" I do not exaggerate when I say that I've followed his career with awe ever since. In this book's penultimate poem, Wormser asks, ""Did I love the beauty enough?"" To which any reader of James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette will thunder, if only to her- or himself, ""Yes, Baron, indeed you did!""Sydney Lea, former Vermont Poet LaureateBaron Wormser once stressed that poetry mirrors caring and how we desperately need to care, so it's not surprising that unapologetic caring is what buoys James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems. Such caring is what has driven all of Wormser's impressive oeuvre-not just his twenty-plus books, but a lifetime of service and commitment to bettering people's lives-and never has it sung with more richness and depth than it does in this ambitious and most personal work. To accompany Wormser across the seven stages of this collection . . . is to experience an empathy borne by keen attentiveness, to witness a poet at the top of his game as he carefully honors what came before, and what still remains.Grant Hier, educator, artist, Poet Laureate of Anaheim (2018-2020), author of Untended Garden (winner of Prize Americana)

Author Information

Baron Wormser authored over a dozen books of prose and poetry. He lived with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont from 2007 until his death in 2025. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of Maine and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2023 his memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, was reissued by Brandeis University Press.

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