Reviews
While Smith’s poems sometimes border on the hermetic, their grasp of modern and post-World War II American poetry chisels a place among a range of challenging contemporary writing.
Matthew M. Gagnon, Jacket

For as much as he’s willing to mock, parody, and pull the rug out from under poetic conventions, whether those of romanticism or current experimental practices, it’s always done with a deep respect and understanding, an irreverence which is somehow reverent and celebratory. [Smith] has in Deed given us a document of empowering, risky, and lasting work, an engaging testament to the complexities and contradictions of our current moment, and one of the few formal contracts worthy of everyone’s signature.
Noah Eli Gordon, Rain Taxi

Interspersing musings on society, assumed voices, and absurd punch lines, [Deed] creates its own experimental logic.
Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper

Smith's poems shuttle line-by-line between what the poet "means" and a kind of chance: how the poet grabs onto what swims across his ken and places it, wholesale, into a poem. The result is a unique collage aesthetic mated with the discovery narrative of the mind, a daily improvisation dependent on the tools at hand...some of the most useful of which are unreason, distraction, humor, piety, not to mention music and honesty.
Publishers Weekly

Reviews of books by Rod Smith

Poems
- (in The Brooklyn Rail)
- (in Sibila)
- (in Beltway Poetry Quarterly)
- (in Double Change)
- (in the DC Poetry Anthology)
- (at In Posse Review)
- (at Damn the Caesars)
- (at Woodland Pattern Book Center)
- (at Poetic Orphanage)
- (in LOCUSPOINT)
- (at the Electronic Poetry Center)
- from (in Apartment Poetry)

Interviews
- , with Patrick F. Durgin
- , with Daniel Gutstein
- , with Stephen McLaughlin
- , with Ross Taylor
- , with Amy Wright

Audio
- on PennSound
- Reading for the at Mercer Union in Toronto