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A deeply introspective poetry collection that intertwines memory, loss, love, and artistic awakening, tracing a writer's life through elegy, exile, and rediscovery across America and beyond.
Magic Show is an emotionally rich and intricately structured poetry collection by Dean Bartoli Smith that traces a writer's life through the prisms of family, loss, art, and remembrance. Divided into three sections—Folly Beach, The Venus Looking Glass, and Ancient Eye—the book chronicles experiences spanning childhood in midcentury America, the ache of growing up amid fractured families, the beauty and pain of memory, and the redemptive power of creativity. These poems weave personal history with cultural memory, invoking landscapes from Baltimore to Italy, from amusement parks to seaside towns, revealing how places live on in the imagination.
Through scenes of youth, grief, and artistic awakening, Smith's voice moves between elegy and vision, intimacy and myth. Magic Show becomes both a family album and a meditation on what it means to inherit and remake a life through words. Magic Show is a deeply introspective poetry collection intertwining memory, loss, love, and artistic awakening, tracing a writer's life through elegy, exile, and rediscovery across America and beyond. Lyrical, visceral, and often cinematic in scope, this collection captures how love, loss, and faith offer resilience in the face of impermanence.
"There is a ruthless honesty in the way that Dean Bartoli Smith evokes the failed magic show and the closed circus, his own early failures and missed opportunities, and yet the past glows with magical intensity in these deep rescue operations, these poignant, mournful, and celebratory poems." — Edward Hirsch
"Dean Smith does not let the dark win. Striking the flint of outrage against the steel of remorse, he sparks a flame that illumines the world's madness and banishes despair's shadow. The magic here is that these public chronicles and personal confessions become a fire that warms the coldest night, a kind of tenderness perhaps only poetry can provide." — Jones, Editor of Poetry East
"With his new collection, Magic Show, Dean Bartoli Smith has knocked it out of the park once again. Yes, this book details some of the terrible stuff of humanity—wars, 9/11, addictions, death, betrayals—but its trajectory lands us in a hard-won state of grace, of love. I keep going back to the image of that poet's grandfather fashioning Babe Ruth’s baseball bat into an axe handle. Kafka says that a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us. This book is certainly that, giving us a way to 'unchain humanity / with beautiful magic: songs and poetry.' A way to 'be ruthless and free.'" — Moira Egan, author of The Furies
Magic Show is Dean Bartoli Smith's third collection of poems. He's previously published Baltimore Sons (Stillhouse, 2021) and American Boy (Washington Writer's Publishing House, 2000). He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season, about the 2012 Baltimore Ravens. He teaches in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University and is the director of Duke University Press.