Room Tone

The "dailyness" in a  Vanessa Smit h poem is never dull, and never what's expected. Her west-coast swagger is reminiscent of early Joni Mitchell - "my face, like an interview, / tells the most important / stories first." Her "uploaded anguish," is that of a speaker who "wipes daily dabs of lipstick on the car carpet," saturating the space, making a hole in its place. She sees that a "rolling wave held something back in response to the sand..." and finds a tragedy there. The daughter of a po