Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. He is the author of a previous poetry collection, Almanac (Princeton), and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, and many other publications. He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.

Other poems by Austin Smith in Verse Daily:
September 28, 2013:   "The Hotel" "The radiator holds..."

Books by Austin Smith:

Other poems on the web by Austin Smith:
"Factory Town"
Two poems
Two poems
"Wounded Men Seldom Come Home to Die"
"We Defy Augury"

Austin Smith's Website.

Austin Smith on Twitter.

About Flyover Country:

"These poems live in the delicate space between the ordinary and the luminous. They are filled with lived experience, sharp scene-setting, close observations, but their power comes from the tact of the rhythm and the diction, the flawless sense of tone. Thus Smith plays memory against mystery, the plain against the visionary, fact against feeling, to produce a poetry that has a vast range of expression, that offers space for a sensibility to emerge richly and fully."
—Colm Tóìbín

"Austin Smith's Flyover Country is a book of vital and generative reckoning, one that finds both the intimate knowledge held in large landscapes and the larger knowledges found within intimate places and acts. Smith travels the paths of the actual, the emotional, and the imaginative with a physical sureness; his words carry mystery, memory, stories personal and communal. These pages carry, too, Smith's sustaining, taproot awareness: that what we put into this world and what we draw from it matter."
—Jane Hirshfield