American Daughters

In Virginia Smith's remarkable journey across continents, states, and centuries, she gives us poetry that gives back some of what has been taken. This is, at its heart, a collection about home, with a wide definition that encompasses the whole of the human experience, uniting those experiences in America: the ideal, the place, and the real. Layers of carefully chosen images build different, intersecting worlds, and bring them home, from Georgia O'Keeffe to Joni Mitchell, from pierogies to Prosecco, from Ru Paul's Drag Race to The Invisible Man, from Covid quarantine to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Virginia embodies the voices of her sisters across America to look through their eyes, and she tells it like it is.

-Lorette C. Luzajic, artist, writer, editor, The Ekphrastic Review



In American Daughters, VA Smith channels the voices of women who bear witness to losses and gains and sustains the empathy required to imagine the lives of others. Smith recognizes that with this collection she has taken risks: to inhabit other identities-even as poetic personae-is to poke the bear of cultural appropriation. It seems a worthwhile risk: the voices she creates are unexpected and undefeated. In her world of West Elm wedding gifts and crumbling Kharkov apartment balconies, Smith curates women's experiences through keen observation and compassion in a poetry of witness-as if she has witnessed them all.

-Deborah Fries, author of The Bright Field of Everything, 2014, Montgomery County Poet Laureate, 2006



Smith's American Daughters is a jewel box of female speakers, rich and dynamic and alive and fraught. They nurse grudges and find joy, break hearts and take care, each one a complete person laid psychologically bare through Smith's tight stanzas and sharp turns of phrase. There's the neurodivergent librarian who seeks peace among her plants-and on stage. The ex-missionary who now finds "holiness only in things of this world"-bike rides, activism, and threesomes. Smith reminds us that these women-like all women-have shame and pleasure and secrets of their own. It's one last grace note in a collection that sings with full force.

-Kate Dailey, editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer