Smudgy and Lossy

Author: John Myers

Publisher: The Song Cave (2018)

Smudgy and Lossy, the first collection of poetry by Idaho-based poet John Myers, offers us a map to a borderless and psychedelically rural landscape—poems begin and end without notice, and the titular characters, Smudgy and Lossy, fade in and out of the rustic settings, situations, and daily chores that Myers assigns to them, "look[ing] for delicate flowers that bloom through hard sand or clay." With an expansive and textured queerness covering each page, the flat horizons of these poems sit too far away to navigate their identity with any certainty. Building continuously toward the collection's final swirling 13 pages, a 127-line list poem leaves us with one of the most exciting and bewildering poetic finales in recent memory.