James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems

The capstone of a distinguished literary career, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems is Baron Wormser’s eleventh book of poetry. It speaks to matters that have haunted and obsessed the author for a lifetime—especially the ways that a finite poem can intersect with the infinitude of being. The book is arranged like a work of fiction, with titled chapters and with single poems of a personal nature standing between each chapter—a thread woven throughout the book. Each chapter reflects themes of longstanding concern: the duality of masculine and feminine, political history, literary progenitors, prophetic voices, and the ways people struggle with the circumstances in which they find themselves. The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once noted that poetry is “an impossible art.” In this collection, Baron Wormser reflects on what he has learned about that art over the course of a lifetime—an inspiring but also chastening experience. “Poetry is useful in giving complexity its due,” the author says, because we live in an age of drastic reductionism, characterized by violent rhetoric, blind partisanship, and outright lying—forces that militate against imaginative reflection and the empathy that can grow out of that reflection. Here are poems that seek to braid thought and feeling—this but also that—poems that register the thrill of being but also linger and provoke, long after they’ve been read.