Crystal Simone Smith was the fifth poet featured in the Sounds of Erasure series. Joining Mahshid Mayar and Sandra Tausel on the final day of April, Smith discussed her latest poetry collection, Common Sense (1776), Addressed to Today’s Citizens of America: An Erasure (Beacon Press, 2026).
A meticulous erasure of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1775–76), the newly published volume revisits and reworks one of the most provocative “founding documents” in US history at a particularly resonant moment: the approaching 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.
Read / Listen to this conversation here.
Erasure
Poetry
Project
by Mahshid Mayar, PhD funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)