Left Bank Books welcomes poet and University of Missouri – St. Louis alumnus Ryan Patrick Smith, who will sign and read from his debut poetry collection, The Death Metal Pastorals, at this St. Louis Launch Party! Refreshments will be provided.

This event is free and open to the public, but proof of purchase of The Death Metal Pastorals from Left Bank Books will be required to enter the signing line.

From page one of Ryan Patrick Smith’s The Death Metal Pastorals, we know we’re entering a landscape at once more ominous and more vigilant than anything conjured by Spencer, Drayton, or Marlowe. Smith’s poems upend the topography of the pastoral setting, peering through a “burning crop of disease” to ask, “Where am I in the field that I give my will over to you?” Through a range of personas, from death metal swains to The Terminator’s Sarah Connor to Mister Rogers to a smartphone camera at a Black Lives Matter protest, Smith casts a piercing eye to the destructive structures of consumption, gendered violence, and white supremacy.