Ryan Patrick Smith is a poet whose work has previously appeared in the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is an associate editor for Boulevard Magazine and teaches in the MFA in Writing program of Lindenwood University. A Kentucky native, he has lived in Lexington, Kentucky and St. Louis, Missouri; right now, he resides with his spouse in Connecticut. The Death Metal Pastorals is his debut chapbook.

Books by Ryan Patrick Smith:

Other poems on the web by Ryan Patrick Smith:
"In the Theater"
"As Mister Rogers Prays to His Aquarium"
"OF BEING TRANSMITTED ON A SILVERY ALIEN WHEEL"
Three poems

Ryan Patrick Smith's Website.

Ryan Patrick Smith on Twitter.

About The Death Metal Pastorals:

"THE DEATH METAL PASTORALS register a lament, caterwauling against entropy, violence, and subjection. Here, each blooming things fades, and what crests must also break. May the bleakness be fleeting, may the song-turned-cry of the lyric shake us out of our stupor--if only to become better conduits for our tears. Ryan Patrick Smith says it better anyhow: 'Everything dies on a wave.'"
—Joshua Marie Wilkinson

"Everything dies on a wave,' writes Ryan Patrick Smith in a voice at once intimate and oracular, inscrutable and plain. But then, the oracle is always intimate, peering into your future by cracking open the chest of a starling to 'track where the steam drifts in the light.' The poems in THE DEATH METAL PASTORALS would make meaning of the world and its brutalities, of nature and its corruption. If we see ourselves in these fields and hills, we are appalled: that hill is made of our city's trash. These are grave, visionary poems, as dark as they are compelling. You will not walk away unchanged."
—Shane Seely