Austin Smith, BEI Fellow, will be joining Dora Malech & Susan Stewart on Thursday, November 15 at 6:00 pm at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ. Austin will be doing a reading of his new book, Flyover Country. 

Austin Smith’s Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence: the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere “flyover country,” a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop.

For more information about the event.