Raw, formally daring, and darkly funny, Murderer confronts the private and public stories used to disguise violence. Through poems about a father’s suicide, a mother’s survival, working-class exhaustion, masculinity, religion, racial power, and American nationalism, Smart investigates what happens when inherited myths can no longer contain the realities they were built to conceal.
At the emotional center of the collection is a father whose life has been consumed by work, debt, silence, and the expectation that a man should repair everything without acknowledging his own collapse. His suicide reverberates across the book, becoming both a family wound and a warning about the lethal consequences of emotional isolation. Smart writes from inside that inheritance while refusing to reduce his father, his family, or himself to a cautionary tale.
The collection’s political vision is equally uncompromising. Flags, soldiers, police, football heroes, televangelists, literary icons, social media, and patriotic slogans are pulled from their familiar settings and forced into confrontation with the bodies and histories they obscure. Smart asks who may commit violence and still be called heroic, who is expected to suffer quietly, and how a nation decides which deaths deserve grief.
Murderer is marked by fractured typography, visual experimentation, apostrophe, satire, repetition, and “insurrectionist syntax.” Its poems resist aesthetic distance, moving rapidly between confession and cultural criticism, fury and tenderness, high literary reference and profane comedy.
“This is poetry unwilling to behave politely in the presence of catastrophe,” said Summer Stewart, editor and publisher of Unsolicited Press. “Smart does not give grief a decorative frame. He lets it interrupt the language, challenge the mythology, and expose what everyone else has agreed not to say.”
Andy Smart lives and writes in Saint Louis, Missouri. He is passionate about reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness, especially as part of suicide-prevention efforts. His work has appeared in literary journals in print and online.
Murderer will be released in paperback on November 10, 2026, by Unsolicited Press. The 70-page collection will retail for $18.95 and will be distributed to the trade through Asterism Books.
