Blood Dazzler

A storm's-eye view of the devastation that forever changed New Orleans and America.

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its “scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,” to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar: The cowboy grins through the terrible din, *** And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails Look like this country done left us for dead. An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be “news that stays news,” Blood Dazzler is a necessary step toward national healing. Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film Slamnation, on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and is a frequent contributor to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Visit her website at www.wordwoman.ws.

Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in Poetry Finalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award "Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smith’s new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautiful—and like the America she embodies and represents—dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines." —Sapphire "One of the best poets around and has been for a long time." —Terrance Hayes "Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome." —Gwendolyn Brooks In her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "that soul beneath the vinyl." Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.

Winner, 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner, NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the Poetry category Winner, 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner, 2018 BCALA Best Poetry Award Winner, Abel Meeropol Award for Social Justice Finalist, Neustadt International Prize for Literature Winner, 2021 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today’s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, Incendiary Art. She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language— "her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses—one by one / by one she wrecks the casket’s spray. It’s how she / mourns—a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"— as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America’s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history.

Presents a collection of short stories featuring noir and crime fiction about Staten Island, New York, by such authors as Todd Craig, Linda Nieves-Powell, S. J. Rozan, and Patricia Smith.

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders. “What power. Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell “I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judge From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation’s premier performance poet. Featured in the film Slamnation and on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam, Smith is back with her first book in over a decade—a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry’s liberating power.

"The poems in Life according to Motown comprise a snapshot of my life at the time I lived it. They're an outloud rendering of vulnerabilities, triumphs, revelations, secrets, insecurities, rebirths, persistent music and, yes - quite a few missteps"--Page viii.

Writing sometimes in dialect, sometimes in gunshot bursts, sometimes in sinuous lines that snake across the page, Santee Frazier crafts poems that are edgy and restless. The poems in Dark Thirty, FrazierÕs debut collection, address subjects that are not often thought of as Òpoetic,Ó like poverty, alcoholism, cruelty, and homelessness. FrazierÕs poems emerge from the darkest corners of experience: ÒI search the cabinet and iceboxÑdrink the pickle juice / from the jar. Bologna, / hard at the edges, / browning on the kitchen / table since yesterday. / I search the cabinet and iceboxÑthe curdling / milk almost smells drinkable.Ó Dark Thirty takes us on a loosely autobiographical trip through Cherokee country, the backwoods towns and the big cities, giving us clear-eyed portraits of Native people surviving contemporary America. In FrazierÕs world, there is no romanticizing of Native American life. Here cops knock on the door of a low-rent apartment after a neighbor has been stabbed. Here a poemÕs narrator recalls firing a .38 pistolÑÒbarrel glowing like oil in a gutter-puddleÓ--for the first time. Here a young man catches a Greyhound bus to Flagstaff after his ex-girlfriend tells him he has fathered a child. Yet even in the midst of violence and despair there is time for the beauty of the world to shine through: ÒThe Cutlass rattling out / the last fumes of gas, engine stops, / the night dimly lit by the moon / hung over the treetops; / owls calling each other from / hilltop to valley bend.Ó Like viewing photographs that repel us even as they draw us in, we are pulled into these poems. WeÕre compelled to turn the page and read the next poem. And the next. And each poem rewards us with a world freshly seen and remade for us of sound and image and voice.

A first-of-its-kind anthology of hip-hop poetica written for and by the people.

Poems that amplify the voices and souls of black men at various stages of their lives, men who always feel as if they are "C2D," close to death.