Praise for Leave Smoke.
“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.”
Jeff Walt’s wonderful poems tell unforgettable stories of the exasperating, heartbreaking, tomcat scre-ups amonng us, whom we’re never able to shoo away from the screen door of our heart--mostly because they are us, we are them.
"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.”
“In Leave Smoke, Jeff Walt balances a shrewd and biting wit with heart-wrenching poems of ache and loss. Scenes of black magic, joy rides, and bar rooms invite the reader into a seedy yet seductive universe. ”
In Leave Smoke, everything is dangerous, especially the mundane: the everyday eight-to-five, the stray dog, the addiction, the gray hairs, and the confession, to the priest or to the mirror, that the power to destroy and create lays waiting in all our fingertips. So this is the poetry of possibility, too. Yes: these poems tell us what will kill us and what will try, but they also expose the magic that makes the grind worth it.