My Radar Data Knows Its Thing

"It was a dark and stormy night. It was rainy weather / and the limits of our language were our weather."

Lytton Smith's My Radar Data Knows Its Thing, winner of the 2017 Foundlings Press Artist Residency and Chapbook Contest, is a deeply sensitive, wide-ranging, and lyrical exploration of human connection, technology, proximity, the past in the present, and the natural environment.

"With each poem that begins with his namesake’s classic line, Lytton Smith’s chapbook tests the limits of language just as it tests the limits of human relationships," the poet Anthony Caleshu writes." Words hold us together even when we’re questioning their validity. Our linguistic (and so our human) scale has just gotten bigger and bolder."

The book features illustrations and conceptual design from Philadelphia-based artist Stephen Fitzmaurice.

Lytton Smith is the author of two books of poetry from Nightboat Books and the translator of several books from the Icelandic. The novel Öræfi—the Wastelands, from the Icelandic of Ófeigur Sigurðsson, will be published by Deep Vellum in spring 2018. He is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo.