In Fidelity
Title: In FidelityContributors: Courtney O'Banion Smith
Published by: Poetry Society of Texas
ISBN13: 978-0996231145
Release Date: July 2023
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 80
How do you stay faithful to the truth, to memory, to others? What do you do after you're betrayed or you betray another? Winner of the 2022 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of Texas, In Fidelity explores how we remember the past and imagine the future while remaining true to our memories, ourselves, and each other.
From poems examining loss, love, and the ecological ramifications of our decisions to a love triangle during the Great Depression and surreal, ekphrastic poems portraying the marriage of a mermaid and a werewolf, these poems expose how we make choices and make a way despite and because of love.
Who could put T. Rex and IKIA in Van Gogh’s bedroom followed by a werewolf and ghosts? Who could have so much at stake? So much subtlety?— Yes, from the beginning, In Fidelity will be a good read. Much relies on paintings— on images— on the storm of love. Courtney O'Banion Smith’s poems are boats for us to row. What else could she do for a flooded world?
Diane Glancy
Jigsaw and Psalm to Whom(e)
The fidelity in Courtney O'Banion Smith's eclectic debut amounts to a devotion to nonstop musicality and a cinematic crispness in sharing revelatory details. Hers is a sensibility that makes time for mermaids ("my scales might as well have been a shimmering dress") and extinct rhinos as well as heady love, addiction, and other everyday foibles. There's empathy in her ekphrastic poems and bravery and candor in her family poems that suggest home can be both ground zero and a wellspring of inspiration. The poet's affection for and curiosity about the brimming world is everywhere present in this dynamic, all-embracing book.
Cyrus Cassells
2021 Poet Laureate of Texas
In Fidelity distinguishes itself [with] a voice that manages a delicate balance between the credibly colloquial and the unexpectedly lyric and wise...Generously grounded in the day-to-day, our one true home, its verses [are] intensified by elements of heartbreaking personal story rendered with a restraint that never sentimentalizes, over-explains, or advertises its occasion. To find faith in such a world, made problematic by generations of loss and betrayal, is to do so without euphemistic abstraction...The author seeks a higher “fidelity” in the sense of both a truth-telling and the loyal kinship such a truth would forge.
Contest Judge, Invention of the Wilderness
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