“I like to read Jared Smith in the middle of the night, the best time for this most recent volume by a poet still so in love with the hard life of humanity that his heart cracks wider open with every collection. He's often been compared with Whitman, but here, where he pays his respects at our collective graves, he puts me more in mind of Blake – not the young one of the Songs, but the darker Blake of the visionary prophecies. I would call this a sad book, but that would not account for how joyous it feels to be reminded that every inch of earth we walk is a sacred bone-heap, and this is now true of our highways and dams and bridges. His elegy grows stronger, his dirge more urgent, for ‘something new is hunting closer to the bone now.’ I'd call him a prophet of doom if it were not for the love that simply aches in every line. He still loves our wounded world, even in sorrow, even in the pain carved into our bodies, the flesh that ‘animates not only itself/ but the stone, the bone, and all we know.’”

   – Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other and Koyaanisqatsi.   

“In The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations, Jared Smith walks the line between the personal and the universal and realism and surrealism, never faltering for a single step. At bottom, the poems are concerned with the ways in which, despite our advances, the plight of the ordinary working man remains the same. The details accumulate with the surety of lived life and a Neruda-like ability to see into and beyond mere surface.”

   – Allen Hoey, author of Chasing The Dragon and The Precincts Of Paradise.