Consequences of a Moonless Night

Consequences of a Moonless Night deepens its native primitivism through humor, surrealism, and soulsearching lyricism. These poems take the reader on a journey where a grandmother “walks with the Beast of the Apocalypse on a leash” into visions of grief, eroticism, and an indelibly reflective reticence that continues to unfold with each reading.

"The poems in Loueva Smith's Consequences of Moonlight are dazzling--'a pearl under the tongue, ' 'an anarchy of wings.' They emerge out of a wildness, an imagination both surrealistic and grounded in the dailiness of East Texas rural life, its eccentricities. The mysterious bonds among sister, brother, mother, father are a galaxy whose star map is folded in upon itself--like a mirror or prism through which the darkness of a life, lives, is navigated, brought shard by shard into the light. And we are haunted by a sweetness too--honey at the corners of a small girl's mouth, honey stored in our eyes like ghosts. The poems become divination, a casting of spells where the body is 'a soft cotton house' and birds build their nests and the 'small white eggs of knuckle bones' beckon us to enter." --Robin Davidson, Houston Poet Laureate

Loueva Smith, a native Texan, is a graduate of Sam Houston State University. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as DoubleTake and Louisiana Review, and she is a contributing poet in Vanishing Points. Her plays have been staged at Frenetic Theater.