by Dean Bartoli Smith (Author)
A deeply introspective poetry collection that intertwines memory, loss, love, and artistic awakening, tracing a writer's life through elegy, exile, and rediscovery across America and beyond.
Magic Show is an emotionally rich and intricately structured poetry collection by Dean Bartoli Smith that traces a writer's life through the prisms of family, loss, art, and remembrance. Divided into three sections--Folly Beach, The Venus Looking Glass, and Ancient Eye--the book chronicles experiences spanning childhood in midcentury America, the ache of growing up amid fractured families, the beauty and pain of memory, and the redemptive power of creativity. These poems weave personal history with cultural memory, invoking landscapes from Baltimore to Italy, from amusement parks to seaside towns, revealing how places live on in the imagination.
Through scenes of youth, grief, and artistic awakening, Smith's voice moves between elegy and vision, intimacy and myth. Magic Show becomes both a family album and a meditation on what it means to inherit and remake a life through words. Magic Show is a deeply introspective poetry collection intertwining memory, loss, love, and artistic awakening, tracing a writer's life through elegy, exile, and rediscovery across America and beyond. Lyrical, visceral, and often cinematic in scope, this collection captures how love, loss, and faith offer resilience in the face of impermanence.
Author Biography
Magic Show is Dean Bartoli Smith's third collection of poems. He's previously published Baltimore Sons (Stillhouse, 2021) and American Boy (Washington Writer's Publishing House, 2000). He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season, about the 2012 Baltimore Ravens. He teaches in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University and is the director of Duke University Press.
Number of Pages: 98
Dimensions: 0.33 x 9.01 x 5.59 IN
Publication Date: October 15, 2026
