Leave Smoke is a book suffused with menace and longing, where people “abandoned and hungry” make their way as best they can in a world of shitty jobs and low-life bars. In Jeff Walt’s universe, angels get drunk and forget their duties, “souls sweep down the alley like ripped plastic Foodland bags,” and nights dissolves into “another irresistibly damned dawn.” Bleak, yes, but readers can take heart from Jeff’s humor and sharp-eyed observations of the more absurd aspects of twenty-first century American life (electric vaginas, the three Wise Men in thongs, the Muse as a dominatrix). What’s left but to find love where we can and insist on celebrating, “our bodies spooned, flawed, used.”

— Kim Addonizio

Leave Smoke celebrates all the ways intimacy arrives in unexpected places: among regulars at a bar, during the supper rush in a restaurant kitchen, hiding in roadside weeds. These poems listen to the music of violence and love spun in clubs, at kitchen tables, by lovers’ bodies, and sing it back to us with enough yearning to draw us into each new day, “another irresistibly damned dawn.”  

-- Jennifer Perrine