review of zac smith

Insane, ‘feral’-seeming photo of Zac Smith, author of 50 Barn Poems and Everything is Totally Fine

Like most online things, I first became aware of Zac Smith’s existence peripherally. He registered to me not so much as a person but an algorithmic mass of data operating in similar spheres of Twitter. Recognizing his brand as my own—‘self-identified internet writer’—my first impulses toward him were primarily adversarial, as I live an insect-like existence, craven with envy. This guy,— I would think with my brow furrowed maniacally when I spotted him on my Twitter ‘feed’ (having parasitically established a mutual Twitter following, planting myself like a spy in the hostile borders of his ‘timeline’): this… fucking… guy…— Typically, my approach for most ‘fellow artists’ I encounter in the puddle-like ‘online lit’ scene is to either ignore them outright or pull up a few of their publications in a liquid fury, skim the opening lines, and confirm their inferiority. Poor little Zac Smith, yes, heh…writing his little writings… his tiny, toddler-sized stories… baby stories for babies… blissfully unaware of his insignificance… living in a virtual diaper of his own ignorance… an infant of the brain… Actually, though, Zac Smith’s stuff turned out to be pretty cool. As I consumed his content with an increasingly desperate inability to find something to criticize, I uncovered (imagine me here as a child in the woods, gruntingly turning over boulders in order to reveal the writhing insects beneath, millipedes especially with their unfathomable count of legs) an overall inoffensive figure. Here is my review of Zac Smith.

 

Zac Smith’s ‘Gimmicks’

In my early period of ‘understanding’ Zac Smith—what we’ll refer to as my sort of ‘Zac Smith Cretaceous Era’—Zac Smith had just published a poetry collection titled 50 Barn Poems¹. The book is just that. It is fifty poems about barns. Seems hard for me to quantify, but Zac Smith plopped himself down one day and simply decided, ‘I’m gonna write about barns, ha ha, and I’m gonna call it 50 Barn Poems.’ This isn’t an idyllic collection meant to celebrate, say, the rural simplicity of farming or whatever, although it’s also too snidely aware of its meta position to be a deconstruction of that romanticization: ultimately it’s a premise that makes fun of itself; when I read the title of this book, I think, ‘Zac Smith is telling me to eat shit, and he’s smiling about it, he’s grinning.’—in short, it’s a dad joke.

Zac Smith then went on to co-author the book-length poem Two Million Shirts with Giacomo Pope (creator of Neutral Spaces, worthy of an entirely separate blogpost), which they painstakingly printed ~70 copies of with their own money while simultaneously releasing an online edition for free, resulting, I have to assume, in a net personal loss. What strikes me about this gimmick is its sheer pointlessness, the almost punk-like futility—it’s a stunt you’d expect from teenagers with a garage band, not two grown men who are currently fathers.

 Arguably the most high-profile stunt on this list, in 2022 Muumuu House published its first book in over a decade: Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine2. I think this is hilarious. Muumuu House, helmed by Tao Lin and thus associated primarily with the NYC alt-lit movement—with its hipster youth, rampant drugs, and edgy outsider art—broke its publishing hiatus to put out the work of a 40ish-year old dad who, to my knowledge, most likely parties minimally and probably gets a hangover from anything more than 2 beers. Obviously this led to a flood of speculation about Tao’s influence on Zac Smith, accusations of sycophantism, etc, but the real story here to me seems to be the two writers’ opposite polarity. Zac Smith is a stable dad defined by the contours of American life, corporate job, suburban home, a used kia in the driveway, whereas Tao is an eccentric living in Hawaii solely off his artistic income, treating his medical issues with a diet of raw meat. The fact that such dissonant personalities found unity in the tumultuous online scene speaks, in my opinion, to the resonance and strength of Zac Smith’s writing, but you should skip to the Everything Is Totally Fine review for more on that.

So what did Zac Smith choose to follow up his monumental Muumuu House debut with? Another self-defeating project, in the same vein as Two Million Shirts—a self-published cookbook, I Hope You Enjoy the Food³. I’m intrigued, again, that most Zac Smith projects do not appear motivated by financial gain or ‘clout’. Instead, Zac Smith seems stupidly, helplessly infatuated with the idea of putting out work simply because it strikes his interest, which I think is the most genuinely anti-big publishing thing an internet writer can do.

 It also seems important to mention that Zac Smith created the most unfathomably shitty website I have ever laid my eyes on.

                     Zac Smith’s derangedly bad website

Words really can’t do justice to how bad and unintuitive this website is. I think a website like this transcends the concept of ‘bad on purpose’. It is, certainly, the inverse of the idea of a ‘writer’s website’, it playfully defies the neat look, the curated formatting, the professionalism a writer’s personal page should aspire to. Yet I cannot downplay the degree that Zac Smith makes looking bad an art form. Any lesser content creator could not have chosen such a sublimely vomit-tinged color for the text, barely visible, and then juxtaposed it with a bloated (and thematically consistent!) jpeg of a burning barn, thus rendering it even less visible, all to ingeniously top with a spattering assault of emojis (not even sure if it’s right to call those hieroglyphics plastered between his links ‘emojis’…like what the fuck are they…? what the fuck are you doing here, Zac Smith…is that a soccer ball…?).

 Last but not least, I need to talk about Zac Smith’s blog, no future tshirt blog, which has a reputation for trashing and ravaging innocent fellow writers, for tearing his peers in the online realm to visceral shreds. Zac Smith is brutally honest, no doubt, but I also don’t think he’s as much of a kneejerk grump as you’d believe. In my opinion, Zac Smith judges books on their own merits; he examines what that book in its own specific context is trying to achieve and measures whether it executes its premise well or not, regardless of how much the subject matter appeals to his own personal taste.

 Overall, I classify projects like these—writing a book-length dad joke, co-authoring a book where the goal seems to have been to skip the extra steps involved in the publishing industry and go straight to losing money, having a shitty website, having a blog known for shitting on his peers, self-publishing a fucking cookbook, all while being published by one of the most prestigiously, annoyingly ‘hipster’ publishers in the ‘alt-lit’ industry—as ‘antics’. It sort of seems like the internet equivalent of being in a high school band and sharing your CD: less delusional ambition and more fun for its own sake and the amusement of 6-12 other people. I kind of like the ‘hobbyfication’ (intuited from that word The Lord of the Rings, a series I haven’t engaged with for probably over a decade, thinking about Hobbits, that pale ‘Gollum’ figure—wasn’t he a silly one, made out of CGI and always seeking his ‘precious’…isn’t there a new Lord of the Rings thing out…? seems insane…how long can they milk these IPs…we need to abolish the copyright system…) Zac Smith has brought to internet writing. In other contexts, this would probably seem insulting to the art form and demeaning to the community at large, but Zac Smith treating his writing as a weekend garage project is jarringly liberating to me. His stunts lack the eunuched yearnings of celebrity and so cannot be categorized as mere jabs at publicity. Rather, Zac Smith’s ‘thing’ seems to be bored suburban tricks, a neighborhood punkishness composed of backyard bike ramps: there is no profit to them, no greater purpose than the brief summer thrill of their own execution.

 Zac Smith Emails, the Zac Smith Email Controversy, Disclosing My Conflicts of Interest

My person involvement with Zac Smith began because of The Quaranzine, another ‘gimmick’ he launched during the 2020 pandemic. As its name suggests, The Quaranzine thematically centers the coronavirus pandemic. Feel like this mag was a particularly bold venture for Zac Smith, risking a disproportionate amount of humiliation. I can think of few things cheesier than writing about your experience of covid-19—sort of the modern equivalent of inserting 9-11 into your fiction. But yet again I’m fascinated by Zac Smith’s gimmick, as it basically amounts to community involvement, projects enticing engagement between peers for no purpose greater than the engagement itself: a dusty driveway in which neglected kids can launch themselves off objects at high speeds and love the shit out of it. Anyway, I sent Zac Smith an email titled doomsday apocalypse coronavirus obliteration annihilation poem with an accompanying poem named ‘pandemic poem’ that he warmly, scoldingly (and correctly) accused of being a ‘bait and switch’, in that the poem’s title was sufficiently less interesting than the subject line of the email I’d delivered it within. This led to a broader discussion, and suddenly we’d spawned an all-out email chain, ongoing, expanding at terrifying, ever-increasing word counts. We continued to inconsistently email one another for ~2 years (announcing my conflict of interests in this review here, this review is compromised). Feel like this is the one part of my ‘review’ where I can leave Zac Smith a proper, indisputable 10/10, I like his emails—enjoy the insane idea of us sending emails back and forth for decades, well into retirement, of being on my deathbed opening another Zac Smith email complaining about raising chickens.

 Zac Smith as the ‘Gordon Lish’ of Modern Alt-Lit—Cyberwriting’s ‘Godfather’

Professionally, Zac Smith is a linguist, or something, he went to school for it, I think. Before Zac Smith, the extent that I understood the role of linguistics in writing was limited to that famous Garielle Lutz essay. Good writers, I understood, use like, glottal sounds or something. They use assonance and synonyms like ‘tallowy’. By contrast, Zac Smith’s writing seems less interested in the forensic theory of words than their concrete uttering, the uhs and heys, the tangible grasp of conversation, all the ugly slippings of metaphasis. He takes a 'punk' approach to this usually rigidly academic topic, which I think is a good summation of his role in modern lit. In my opinion, he might just be one of the most important figures 'in the scene' at this current moment. He’s technically gifted, such that everything he writes from an ordinary blogpost to cookbook to Muumuu House-accepted manuscript is imbued with a masterful understanding of words, conveying meaning efficiently and evocatively. He has taste, he understands when a piece is or isn’t working based not on his own biases but the context the writing establishes for itself. Furthermore, he’s bold—he’s not afraid to call shit out when he sees it, my favorite Zac Smith criticism being a rather pedantic blow to Ottessa Mosfergh where he criticizes a scene in My Year of Rest and Relaxation for anachronistically using Bluetooth at a time period when the technology had not yet been invented. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, Zac Smith is just some guy. He's not a lofty, pretentious NYT-bestselling author, he's a dad with a hobby and an immense understanding of the scene and craft. I think it's insane/funny/fitting that Zac Smith, one of the most talented voices of our generation, has a boring suburban office job instead of a premier fiction editorship at The New Yorker or whatever, as I wholeheartedly believe he brings a Gordon Lish-level influence to alt-lit. In a better world, Zac Smith would be at the forefront of literature rather than cracking dad jokes in its musty mancave, laughing alone to himself in darkness.

 

 

1Review of Zac Smith’s 50 Barn Poems

Feel increasingly disillusioned by what I can only identify as an ‘anti-writing’ streak in current online lit. I’m casting lazy umbrella terms, but it seems to me that the combination of shorter attention spans demanded by reading things on your phone plus a ‘punkish’ disdain of mainstream publishing and the formalized techniques associated with it has created an overall bland soup of style praised as ‘writing for people who hate reading’. Hip as it is to shit on Rupi Kaur, her trademark—taking otherwise banal statements and forcing profundity into them via line breaks—forms the core of your average internet poem, which is usually a shitty viral tweet with enjambment for flair. Based on that, seems like I should maybe hate 50 Barn Poems, whose content can be summarized by the example of the piece BARN POEM 6, which opens ‘oh man / is that a barn? / never seen one in real life before / nice’. What saves Zac Smith though, I think, is that these poems are not written as viral posts, they’re not meant to spit in the face of ‘big publishing’, they’re not an ironic postmodern deconstruction of what poetry 'is' or whatever—I don’t think they’re trying to be anything but barn poems. A lot of 50 Barns reads like old haikus, not just because of the structural terseness but the way it allows images to float, hang, and breathe. To compare, here’s a classic Basho haiku (above) compared to BARN POEM 20:

These are the same poem, to me. And not to imply unoriginality on Zac Smith’s part—rather, Zac Smith has tapped into the attic-creak of a centuries-old haiku and revitalized it in modern context. Elsewhere in this blogpost I refer to 50 Barns as one long dad joke, but Zac Smith also knows when to break up his humor, how to bring flow and beats to a comedy routine. For every inanely rambling piece like BARN POEM 21’s ‘here comes the barn / rattlin’ rattlin’ barn / watch out! / oh damn!’, you get these startling slashes of loneliness and reflection: I especially like BARN POEM 13’s chasmic drop of ‘i open the barn / it is full of snakes’, BARN POEM 34’s lonely barnacled barn drifting at sea, BARN POEM 37’s barns that are ‘ready to fucking kill someone / ready to slit some fucking throats’, BARN POEM 1’s declaration ‘these are the barns in my head’, and BARN POEM 23, a prose poem detailing a loved one’s loss that stands out from the rest of the collection in its length and somber tone. Feel like a lot of writers are eager to disarm their work, forming a proto-defense against any future readers who would take them too seriously and form meaningful critiques; when authors exclaim ‘I’m not like other writers’, it’s not so much an artistic statement than an excuse. Whereas Zac Smith will lean into zany silliness while still puncturing our hearts effectively as any classically-revered, Robert Hass-translated haiku. As a result, nothing in this collection comes across as half-assed, even when a lot of these pieces are outwardly meant to appear as so. Zac Smith earns his fucks and lols here, I feel.

 2Review of Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine

As I’ve mentioned, people like to make comparisons between this book and Tao Lin’s work, specifically Lin’s ~2006 bear parade era (I’m making this up baselessly, I have literally never seen anyone make this specific comparison but it’s what I feel to be most accurate), but I think this does Zac Smith a disservice by implying his work is derivative and thus watered down. Everything Is Totally Fine, in my opinion, builds on and stylistically perfects the abstract, unconventional early Tao Lin experimentalism. Everything Is Totally Fine is at its most masterful in stories like ‘Today Is Totally Fucked 2’ (unsuspecting piece about breaking a coffee pot that succinctly encompasses the horror of existing, of having to be alive, each and every day, looking after yourself, after your children; also showcases the ‘Zac Smith’ approach to linguistics that defies the Lutzian school where the emphasis isn’t on curated syntactical elegance but strategic employment of ‘real world’ linguistics, the metastasis here that dissolves into complete abandonment of all language is hilarious and inexplicably heart-rending), ‘Your Heartbeat as a Depressed Man Repeatedly Smashing His Face Against the 18th-Floor Glass Window’ (best title for a short story I have seen in the past ~2 years), ‘What a Disaster!’ (demonstrates Zac Smith’s skill with minimalism, how through nothing more than a series of blunt and constrained images Zac Smith can usher the reader into an explosion of tragic, warm, human emotion), and ‘Taking even just 5 minutes to sit quietly and follow your breath can help you feel more conscious and connected for the rest of your day’ (really good anti-irony ironic critique of capitalist irony. I don’t know what that means. Has incredible ending line ‘I feel suicidal every day and I don’t know how anyone doesn’t feel this way.’), which showcase Zac Smith’s central strengths as a writer: 1.) stylistic expertise, there are just so many perfect titles, endings, beginnings, and middles here, Zac Smith has a refined, microscopic understanding of what each and every sentence needs to accomplish in a piece, 2.) linguistic knowledge, which seeps into this collection not as post-grad masturbation but absurdist insanity, and 3.) random plot gimmicks (whale penises, narrators with guns that can shoot doors, narrators who kill every cop in America ~20-25 times). Most vocal critiques I’ve seen toward this book attack Zac Smith’s serious-yet-not-serious deadpan approach, where the collection’s over-the-top depression renders the stakes nonexistent and without meaning—why should we care, for example, about characters in a book where they shoot up schools in one story just to joke about dick pizzas in the next?—but I think this line of criticism is shallow and frankly fucking incorrect. You people need to read more books; not everything is Harry Potter. I did think the ‘weaker’-seeming pieces are those overtly lacking a hook or gimmick. Of the top three Zac Smith attributes I listed above, typically the stories featuring just 1.) but missing 2.) or 3.) fell short, to me—I didn’t like, for example, “White Zinfandel 1” or “White Zinfandel 2”, which are two stories about bleakly getting drunk. I imagined Zac Smith included pieces like these to maybe pad out the collection, not filler-wise, but to give the reader a ‘break’ from the more insane bits, allowing some breathing room such that the stronger stories hit all the harder when we dive back into them. Anyway, they’re by no means ‘bad’, if anything my only critique is they lack the punch found elsewhere in the book—published individually and outside the context of Everything Is Totally Fine, they’d probably be perfect/highly praised. On a final note, I do think that Everything Is Totally Fine marks a departure from Zac Smith’s early work. For me, he goes from ‘dad on the internet with some heartfelt poems and an engaging understanding of how to write flash fiction’ to legitimate authorship/artistry. This is truly a ‘Book’, capital B. My final review of Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine, my blurb: ‘This is a book and you can read it.’

3Review of Zac Smith’s I Hope You Enjoy the Food

This is a cookbook that teaches you how to cook. Saying so probably seems redundant but is actually in my experience quite rare—Zac Smith isn’t concerned just with sharing recipes, but familiarizing the reader with the fundamentals of cooking: budgeting, not wasting groceries, meal prepping, ‘how to like breakfast food again’. While reading, I consistently imagined an alternate universe where Zac Smith released this as a series of YouTube videos. As a former bachelor, I’m overly-familiar with the sphere of YouTube dedicated to teaching the basics of cooking, a market that seems bloated but not cornered—I think the degree to which ‘simple, how to cook’ introductory videos complicate things is laughable (vividly recall one such video whose ’30-second breakfast’ hack was owning an immersion circulator). By contrast, Zac Smith’s guide is the most approachable take on the format I’ve seen. Recipes are imprecise, lacking exact measurements and step-by-step, but that’s OK as I think Zac Smith’s generalizations soften the kitchen’s more daunting aspects and encourage the reader to view this activity less as nuanced art and more a method of throwing tasty shit together to feed yourself and your family. Basically, I really enjoyed this approach to teaching people how to cook, and I wish it could be scaled to a YouTube video with 1 million views to help as many bachelors in need as possible.