Description:
James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette is Baron Wormser's 11th book of poetry.
Brief description: Baron Wormser authored over a dozen books of prose and poetry. He lived with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont from 2007 until his death in 2025. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of Maine and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2023 his memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, was reissued by Brandeis University Press.
Review Quotes: Among poets, Baron Wormser stands as our preeminent narrator of souls. "Tell me what is human," one speaker entreats, and these poems-imaginatively inhabited, historically informed, psychologically probing-aim to do just that. Like the movies evoked throughout this book, they offer penetrating close-ups, poignant scenes, and indelible voices as they unreel in time, illuminated and illuminating. Drawing on poetic resources that have grown deeper and ever more surprising over five decades, Wormser urges us to look into the maw of time and see. . . . I, for one, cannot look away.Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Lessons with ScissorsI was a greenhorn magazine editor in the late seventies when I became aware of Baron Wormser's nonpareil gifts. I saw how he blended one of the most impressive intellects I would ever encounter with stunning lyrical gifts, producing poetry that- without the least affectation or self-vaunting- saw to the very core of human existence and, for all humanity's evils and foibles, insisted on finding what he names "beauty and fractured love." I do not exaggerate when I say that I've followed his career with awe ever since. In this book's penultimate poem, Wormser asks, "Did I love the beauty enough?" To which any reader of James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette will thunder, if only to her- or himself, "Yes, Baron, indeed you did!"Sydney Lea, former Vermont Poet LaureateBaron Wormser once stressed that poetry mirrors caring and how we desperately need to care, so it's not surprising that unapologetic caring is what buoys James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems. Such caring is what has driven all of Wormser's impressive oeuvre-not just his twenty-plus books, but a lifetime of service and commitment to bettering people's lives-and never has it sung with more richness and depth than it does in this ambitious and most personal work. To accompany Wormser across the seven stages of this collection . . . is to experience an empathy borne by keen attentiveness, to witness a poet at the top of his game as he carefully honors what came before, and what still remains.Grant Hier, educator, artist, Poet Laureate of Anaheim (2018-2020), author of Untended Garden (winner of Prize Americana)