Charlie Smith’s Women of America is a journey traveling both familiar and unfamiliar roads, the external and the internal, with incisive glimpses into the heart of a man who uses words as his compass:

I was thinking of a woman I loved,
who wouldn’t love me.
I thought I would never get past this,
and though it was obvious I would,
that we all do, I began to love the pain
that didn’t want to go away, and held on to it. (“Compared to What”)

“That is, darling, your turn will come.
I’d walk out on myself if I could.
I love the distant glow in the nighttime desert sky
like a worn yellow spot in the dark
everything might still slip through. (“Late Days: Outside Las Vegas”)

Dearest, they are tearing
down the movie theaters-
blackened areas in which
we clutched each other,
leaving marks. (“Talking to Whom”)