DESTRUCTION OF MAN

* Smith will be touring with Third Man related artists such as Margo Price, Lillie Mae and more. * Smith has always toured on his own and will continue to do so. He will be appearing AWP 2018, Mission Creek Festival, SXSW, Willie Nelson's Luck ranch (tentative), plus dates in Chicago, NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco (City Lights), Detroit, Nashville, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, Oxford, Mississippi, and more. We have commitments for blurbs from Drive by Truckers lead singer Patterson Hood and poets Tyehimba Jess (Pulitzer Prize) and Juliana Spahr (Hardison Poetry Prize). * We are interested in co-op *We are also very interested in p&p (ie dumps) displays etc. * Reviews and Publicity: We will be hiring an outside publicist to complement our own in house publicity. Galleys will be mailed to 200 reviewers and also available for request. Periodicals and webpages who will be receiving copies are The Believer, The New York Times, Coldfront, The New Yorker, Rumpus, Boston Review, Vice, Los Angeles Times, Rain Taxi, Bookslut, Paris Review. Media: A trailer for the book itself plus multiple videos for select poems will be produced. We have also professionally filmed Abraham Smith reading the book in its entirety. The film is a three hour tour d force of poetry, images, and flying sweat. We will be releasing parts of the film leading to the release of the book, and then the film in its entirety. Professional videos for both a single poem from the collection and a trailer for the general book will be made. * Different celebrities from the TMR family will be contacted to participate ifor blurbs .We will be approaching celebrities such as: Patterson Hood and Margo Price. Social Media: TMB and TMR use all social media platforms regularly to post reviews, excerpts and profiles related to TMB authors. We also have sent exclusive audio downloads of select authors to our Vault subscription service. This download is always accompanied by blurbs, photos, links to relevant sites, and author bio. *Third Man Books Twitter 2,358 Followers *Third Man Records Twitter 118k Followers *Third Man Records FB 135,830 Likes *Third Man Records.com receives an average 3500 visits per day *Third Man Records Instagram has 64k Followers *Third Man Books.com is housed within ThirdManRecords.com

Willie Nelson sang for Farm Aid and it didn't work: this won't either: yet this is a book: a book about farming and a family man and a familiar county--stung body; stung land--as told by a tweaked-to-warble farm machine that ate a human arm, and the chicken ate what's left, and the hawk ate what's left, and then the hawk died of old age.Some say Abraham Smith's live readings are the best in America, except it's more accurate to say he howls rather than reads. So, better to call his readings hollerings, which often times might take place next to a tree. Listen to his howl via the flexi-disc included in DESTRUCTION OF MAN. You will hear the postmodern pastoral incantatory prophesy told through colloquialism and a minding of song. Music has a scent and the song logic as this book meanders along that broken and disjointed road. Regional writing is a curse, it seems; but this book is unabashedly regional, in the sense that Smith sought to translate the stories of his native county--and thereby the fading gleam or echo of a dying agrarian lifeway. This is a book-length poem about small scale family farming in the midst of the get-big-or-get-out mantra and foghorn. More broadly, this is a book-length poem about culture history and masculinity and our rupturing and sometimes obliterating elisions with machines. The conclusions are clarion clear: rurality has its hectic musics and all we have is love. Gertrude Stein said the seed of DESTRUCTION OF MAN: "After all anybody is as their land and air is."