The Square

Author: Lytton Smith

Publisher: New Michigan Press (2021)

The Square is the winner of the 2020 New Michigan Press Chapbook Contest and the newest collection by Lytton Smith, author of The All-Purpose Magical Tent and While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It.

"Lytton Smith reaches in these poems for the deepest collective meanings of the square as shape and place where history changes-and then changes again. These profound poems capture the after and the after and the after of human history as it has played out upon squares all over the world. In the transfixing convergence of forms and histories that surface in these astounding poems, Smith has created an urgent, stirring poetics of the square and its role in social movements all over the world."

–Idra Novey

"I often think of a protest as a pause, or a gap, a way to break the inevitability of time’s arrow. The Square does what the most powerful, life-altering protests have done and will do—it fortifies the individual while not just envisioning but manifesting a new community  a new world lived, if only for a moment, teaching us how to radiate into new days."  

–TC Tolbert