From the Mediterranean to the American West, the poems in Ron Smith's new collection move across time and place to find reliable truths through personal observation. Beyond his own experiences Smith draws from the lives of notable and diverse figures — Edward Teller, Edgar Allan Poe, Mickey Mantle, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn Warren, Jesse Owens, Leni Riefenstahl, and many others.
Its Ghostly Workshop probes the fallibility of philosophy while strengthening the quest for certainty. Wondering and weighing, these are poems capable of conviction as well as doubt. Like the city of Rome, the subject at the book's center, Its Ghostly Workshop aims to rewire us, to "virus" us, to "rush" us "with visionary blazes, cascades / of memory, incandescent logic."