"raw & zero, in brain, braid & bract, is exemplary proof of the poem as a devotional node: arrayed with pristine consciousness, Kyger-striped like the fiery Costus flower, a double-edged sensuality like the late Sinéad / Shuhada, & the most mentally vasodilational sense of enjambment. Keep it open, imogen. & you too, Reader."Aristilde Kirby
"This is devotional poetry, straddling the erotic & religious, affirming human connection. smith believes empathy strengthens the soul, that feeling broken by the news & all thats collapsing persuades your soul of its worth, as long as youve oriented yourself properly (in your sex, writing, & political lives). smiths acts of devotion to the material world grieves friends deaths & deaths our taxes paid for, demanding that past & future reconcile."Evan Kennedy
"These are poems that celebrate the body and heart of the transgender self, of the authors transgender self, offering all with an equal acknowledgment; a kind of grace, writing the spiritual and the physical, God and assholes, in divine and equal measure." rob mclennan "raw & zero is a book of ecstatic verses contemplating spiritual & trans personhood, an erotic poetics insisting that everything is holy, the asshole is holy, the transsexual revert is holy, the jouissance of the mixtape is holy. imogen offers us a vision of God as emoticon, sort of like a creepy ghost with four eyes. This is a deep exploration of divine mystery."Julian Talamantez Brolaski
"With a hundred & one reasons why we have our hands & faces in the dirt, imogen smiths poems grow as if their natural habitat is with herbs & flowers, fruiting bodies & vegetation. These unashamed verses are a study in erotics & belonging, the poet a constant student to desire, reminding us that change is a continuum, beginning in our own bodies. An invitation to open every node, synapse, orifice & petal. God is Earthwade in."Nat Raha
"dear imogenim thinking about how evenings are for sex & soft drugs, how you & i both belong to god, how the word profane can also mean ordinary, routine, & how yr poetry refracts & distributes an ecoslutty gospel& im doing all this while sucking on a rock still warm from the sun. love, tatiana."Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
