Interviews
“The people who want you to see the world as a dead, doomed place are the ones who want to sell you narcotics and Cheetos and luxury leather goods. And fuck them.” Write Or Die
“It’s popular to bash [MFA programs] as style factories where your edges get sanded down, but it’s been my experience that any group of readers, whether in a formal setting or not, will collectively steer you toward the expected. I think it’s important to keep your own heart’s guidance at the front, no matter who’s reading your stuff.” Poets & Writers
“One of the crucial turns in the book occurs when Cindy begins to realize that even though she has been in tremendous pain and also caused tremendous pain, she still has the choice of deciding how she's going to react from then on — what she's going to do with that knowledge. And it turns out for her that realizing that that decision matters is actually, in a way, the beginning of unexpected happiness for her.” Weekend Edition
“What I find so fascinating about crime stories and tropes from narratives like popular fiction and television. We have this huge appetite for a certain kind of story because it reinforces some sense of innocence for us. If you’re the person who’s reading the disappearance mystery story you’re not the bad guy, by virtue of the fact that you’re reading it.” Five Dials
Reviews
for Marilou Is Everywhere
“This novel reads like a miracle.”
— NPR
Finalist for the LA Times Prize for First Fiction
A Belletrist Book Club pick
A Skimm Reads pick
“Strange and gripping.”
— The New Yorker
“Moving, wise, and important.”
— Vulture (Best Overlooked Books of 2019)
“Marilou is Everywhere is a novel of stunning emotional intelligence, and Cindy an unforgettable character, but it’s Smith’s writing that’s the real star of the book…The book is almost otherworldly in its beauty and power. . .Fiction debuts this accomplished don’t come along very often at all, and Marilou Is Everywhere proves that Smith is a writer of immense talent and rare imagination.”—Michael Schaub, NPR
— MICHAEL SCHAUB, NPR“It’s a book brimming with longing, with heartbreak. It’s a coming-of-age by coming into somebody else. . . . And yet the novel is about more than just adolescent angst, a young girl’s longing to be somewhere else, someone else. Its universality lies in its generosity — its empathy for every character within it, regardless of his or her decisions, no matter how flawed. There is compassion for questionable actions rooted in longing. Reduced to those longings, are any of us so dissimilar?”
— NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW“Magnificent . . . You crack open a book which seems to be about a missing girl and end up on a journey about what it means to be an outsider, to live with the trauma of neglect. It explores questions about how a young person might find her way through life with no adults lighting the way with care.”
—PITTSBURGH CURRENT “This one’s like ‘Sliding Doors’ meets ‘Freaky Friday’ from a sharp, smart writing voice.”
—THE SKIMM“Simmering mystery that confronts questions about the consequences of action and inaction alike, and what it means to belong.”
—VANITY FAIR“Stunningly evocative . . . a depiction of poverty and insularity that wouldn’t be out of place in the books of Lauren Groff or Tim Gautreaux.”
—BOSTON GLOBE “Stark, vivid and emotional, this novel examines what it means to disappear.”
—ELECTRIC LITERATURE“Marilou Is Everywhere is a breathtakingly empathetic portrayal of a young woman in crisis, and an astonishingly assured debut. With lyrical precision, Ms. Smith writes Cindy with humanity and kindness, bringing her to vivid life. . . Cindy’s hunger to have those miles inside of her be recognized is part of the most human of desires: to be known as a person with an inherent worth — a need that countless hearts everywhere carry inside of them.”
—PITTSBURGH POST GAZETTE“Sarah Elaine Smith’s remarkably accomplished debut novel casts a wondrous spell. Her brilliantly drawn young narrator, a young girl starved of maternal love and a stranger to human kindness, easily wins our sympathy . . . . Marilou Is Everywhere has drama and poignancy, but its other source of delight is Smith’s stunning prose. Beautiful phrasings or original formulations glint on the page . . . we find ourselves swept along while marveling at a unique new voice.”
—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE “[Sarah Elaine Smith] has thrown down a tale that transcends place. The dexterity of her writing and the intricacy of the story make ‘Marilou Is Everywhere’ deserving of another familiar tag in the book world: a stunning literary debut.”
—PITTSBURGH QUARTERLY“Sometimes a story haunts you. The prose leaves you raw, defying you to articulate what the book is because it feels too immense. Sarah Elaine Smith’s debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, is such a book. . . Written in Smith’s evocative prose, Cindy’s voice is remarkable . . . Smith succeeds in capturing the intricacies of poverty empathy, which makes the novel a particularly heartbreaking read.”
—PASTE “Beautiful debut novel. . .one of the most unforgettable books I’ve read this year, offering a uniquely haunting, but also disarmingly funny and lyrical look at loss, love and the desire to be seen for who you know yourself to be.”
—NYLON “Smith’s writing is feral. It’s alert, skittish, and hungry. . .A poignant story of accountability.”
—BUST MAGAZINE“This is a mysterious and strangely exciting debut. Smith is a poet, and writes in sensory-driven, soul-tapping prose . . . Literary-minded teens will find a kindred heroine in the wonderfully weird and wry Cindy.”
—BOOKLIST “Hauntingly gorgeous… Spare and sensual and surprisingly funny… Smith’s characters are as rich as her prose.
—KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEWfor I Live in a Hut
“It’s simple, really: Smith’s poems are fun to read. This is a reductive and facile categorization, to be sure, and stating someone’s poetry is ‘fun’ often means it is deficient in some manner or overly simplistic. The word fun has such little purchase in literary criticism because it means essentially nothing—what is ‘fun’ for one reader is laborious and dull for another. Smith’s kind of fun, than, is of the type that is actually fun. Think laughing out loud. Think verbal waterfalls, linguistic roller coasters. Slips and slides and alliterative rolls off the tongue. Inside jokes that cement new friendships.”
—JEFF ALESSANDRELLI, THE RUMPUS“Jack Gilbert insists that ‘there will be music despite everything,’ and Smith has taken this sentiment to heart, transposing ‘beauty’ for ‘music,’ and does so not only with rhetoric — and I use this term loosely — but with abundant passion, however tonally variegated it may be, and the power of her poetic facilities, and this is why she should be read. Not by sheer talent alone, but with the skill of a technician unabashed to say ‘… I / have only promised to attempt. I have attempted. Let’s move on.’”
—DARIUS ANTWAN STEWART, CERISE PRESS“Smith’s imaginative, quick-silver language is a distinct pleasure, as is her wisdom.”
—EILEEN TABIOS, GALATEA RESURRECTS #25“I’m able to hold on because there is a great deal of empathy here, a feeling of camaraderie inside the confusion of living. Joy and despair are equally inexorable, horribly, humanly linked.”
—NICK STURM, COLDFRONT'S TOP 40 POETRY BOOKS OF 2012“S.E. Smith's poetry is not bound by region, but is rather an egret flung across the literary landscape like a sprite or a storm. The simplicity of her book title, I Live in a Hut, is deceptive, and only hints at the wild, rambunctious spirit of possibility when a poet throws a party. This is a book worth reading, and a poet worth watching.”
—MARCI CALABRETTA, GULF STREAM