"Life's too Short to Be an Underdog." is the story of a boy and his dog.and another dog.and yet another one.well, several more after that. Author Dave Smith boldly reveals the sometimes confusing, occasionally tragic, but always amusing history of the 'Smith Family Dog Curse." For so many years the family was denied in their attempts to cultivate a lasting bond with any dogs because of a series of mysterious events. In the midst of the family's pain and heartache, one dog managed to beat the curse and became the inspiration of many spiritual insights for his beloved master. Dave opens up the...

In THE WICK OF MEMORY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1970 - 2000, Dave Smith's poetry reveals as never before its roots in the elegiac tradition that has marked a southern literature that has been so prominent in the twentieth century. Yet equally visible, now, is the ancestral shadow of the Anglo-Saxon poetry from religious questing and the inner voyaging of dreams to the runic parables of nature and its implacable force. Smith's style is a gritty, ever realistic presentation of human dilemmas in a world both familiar to us all and eerily strange, a world where the actions of individual character...

A Woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Advertising.