Paces the Cage by S*an D. Henry-Smith

*(DO NOT ORDER YET) Presale begins in January, 2026*

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s second full-length book of poems, PACES THE CAGE lifts off from their previous book, Wild Peach (2020), by expanding an already-queered language to near breaking point. Through the complexities of Henry-Smith’s personal experiences and the use of a poetically fragmented voice, the literal and metaphorical are here remixed in real time. Henry-Smith’s occasional inclusion of ambient sounds, 
and a musical language and tone used throughout the book helps to build a rich auditory landscape that enhances the immersive quality of the poems, creating a deep and evocative collection of poems by this adventurous and endlessly exciting artist. As if it were an improvised performance itself, PACES THE CAGE actively tunes personal 
and historical narratives of oppression and adversity with the act of speaking and what it means to be truly heard by a community of one’s fellow creators and collaborators.

PACES THE CAGE extends S*an D. Henry-Smith’s interdisciplinary, improvisational listening into a poetics of “fissure and measure,” where silence and the sonic converge in boundless motion. Tuning language toward the frequencies of breath, pulse, and sociality, Henry-Smith's poems transport us from natural worlds to communal forms to Bill Gunn’s STOP, recovering wayward images and utterances to compose a surround sound of loss and renewal. What emerges is both reckoning and remedy—a lush sensitivity to the ways language becomes live, as in now, as in “eyes open, full of rage.”

–Maxe Crandall

S*an D. Henry-Smith’s reverberant propositions seek the music of mutual renewal, constantly and impatiently approaching the present. This is a field of spiraling, alliterative song, the wild signature of Henry-Smith’s lyric, that renews commitments to militancy by naming and knowing its enemies as doubtlessly as it names and knows it lovers. PACES THE CAGE considers a set of conditions - technical, material phenomena - that produce collective and contradictory imaginations and gives words to the song that makes the gathering last, “all in for all…”. PACES THE CAGE is a beautiful rehearsal of attentiveness, a rigorous and generous correspondence with the edges of the frame.      

– dove, Christine Kirubi

 S*an's PACES THE CAGE recalls to me Akliah Oliver’s 2004 On Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet. A lyrical unleashing into the many selves, the author here plays conduit for many beautiful bodies; for those souls wandering at daybreak; for the pudgy greased cheeks and those that murmur in the dew of twilight uncloaked. It is as if the poet has extracted from the marsh, the runoff, roundup and peat to stockpile and make lush a new yet familiar world.  S*an has created a collection of diamonds from the salty mines of turtle tears. The divorce defanged possessive absent its apostrophe, left to the mud puddle for butterfly nuptials throughout tells the reader; How you know me Now will be Different from how you knew me. These buoyant poems that are S*an’s latest song have not missed the train this time. Make certain that you don’t.  I’m in awe.

–Latasha Diggs

S*an D. Henry-Smith is a poet and photographer, working by extension in sound, performance, and publishing.They have received awards and fellowships from Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, and Poets House. Recent solo exhibitions include "tremor low" at ROZENSTRAAT in Amsterdam (2023) and “in awe of geometry & mornings” at White Columns in New York (2021). Henry-Smith has read and performed previously at The Poetry Project, Basilica Soundscape, 47 Canal, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Stedelijk Museum, Metro54, and elsewhere. Their book Wild Peach (2020), was published by Futurepoem, and shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and they are the author of two chapbooks: Body Text (2016) and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System (2019), the co-author (alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson) of Consider the Tongue (2019), and the director of Lunar New Year (2021). Henry-Smith regularly collaborates in sound, poetry, performance, and education with Dweller Electronics, Imani Elizabeth Jackson as mouthfeel, Ryan C. Clarke, Danny Sadiel Peña, Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Alec Mateo, and Derica Shields, among others.