Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Start With A Small Guitar is a collection of poems that celebrate and suspect, extol and mourn, despise and pray for love, in all its terrible, bewitching iterations. Neither biography nor dream--despite the way the poems' titles mislead--these poems hope and pretend and, in the end, wrap their arms around a language that gives rise to love's mysteries. The poet hopes that her readers will be bewildered and enchanted, infuriated and left on a precipice. -- Provided by publisher.

A BreakBeat Poets anthology, Black Girl Magic celebrates and canonizes the words of Black women across the diaspora.

"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.