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Books
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Poetry
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Shoulda
Been Jimi Savannah
Winner of the 2014 Rebekah Bobbitt Prize
Winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith explores
the second wave of the Great Migration. From her
parents’ move from the South to Chicago to
being raised as an “up North” child
under the spell of Motown music, she captures the
rampant romanticism of waiting and hoping and the
dogged disappointment and damage of living under
a delusion. Shifting from spoken word to free verse
to traditional forms, she reveals “that soul
beneath the vinyl.”
$16.00 + $2 S&H
This book will arrive signed by the author.
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Reviews
“ Patricia
Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America
today. Ms. Smith’s new book 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
“
Here is one of our essential poets at the top of her
form, bristling with energy and fire, praise and outrage.
There’s no one like Patricia Smith, and her bold,
necessary poems light up the American twentieth century
in all its song and sorrow.” —Mark Doty
“
From the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, these poems embody
America. Patricia Smith is a formidably gifted poet,
yet perhaps her greatest gift is her openness—my
heart is made larger when I live with any of her words,
if only for awhile.”—Nick Flynn
“
At her best Patricia Smith writes poems full of risk
and courage, thick with pain and alive with insight and
humor. At her best, Patricia Smith confronts memory with
delight and alarm, and manages to find music in the abject
and callow. At her best, Patricia Smith has discovered
the necessary equation to make beautiful, memorable poems:
she calls it ‘the crunch / of bone, suck of marrow.’ In
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, part elegy to things past,
part epic poem of migration and the planting of roots,
part anthem to Chicago, to family, to the deepest unspeakable
secrets of a girl’s coming of age, Patricia Smith
is at her best, and the gift she presents to us is truly,
truly priceless.” —Kwame Dawes
“
Patricia Smith’s newest collection, Shoulda Been
Jimi Savannah, evokes a sense of history and self-awareness
combined with precise storytelling and the most crafted
verse. . . . In her current incarnation, we find one
of the most authentic voices of Modern American Poetry.” —Pank
Magazine
“
The people here are so vividly drawn that the reader
is deep in their world by the fourth poem of the book,
and what a rich, many-layered world Smith creates, full
of passion, struggle, and a fierce and vivid surviving,
behind which, all ‘swerve and pivot,’ all ‘languid,
liquid, luscious’ is Motown. . . . Smith’s
poems are their own powerful music.” —Mead
Magazine
“
Welcome to a place of hopes and dreams punctured with
rawness and pain. Patricia Smith’s autobiographical
epic is cinematic in scale yet music box in intimacy.
. . . Smith compresses culture ’til it peals like
crystal—like singing light.”—The Brooklyn
Rail
“
Smith is a powerhouse poet. Her poems are as tightly
constructed as masonry, yet they are quick-footed, spinning,
singing, funny, and heartbreaking. . . . Smith’s
immediate, deeply compassionate, magnificently detailed
narrative poems of one young woman’s complicated
coming-of-age embody the sorrows, outrage, and transcendence
of race-bedeviled, music-redeemed twentieth-century America.” —Booklist (starred review)
“
Motown saturates the language and weaves itself into
Smith’s narratives. Focusing on the stinging memories
of growing up black and a woman during the 1960s, one
could overlook Smith’s mastery of rhyme, rhythm
and form, but it runs like an electric current throughout
the collection.” -- Publishers Weekly |
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Blood
Dazzler – 2008 National Book Award
Finalist!
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 5 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 on
television.
$16.00 + $2 S&H
This book will arrive signed
by the author.
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Reviews
“
Hurricane Katrina has receded from the national news,
but the destruction it wrought has found testimony in
literature. Patricia Smith's €erce, blood-in-the-mouth
collection of poems, a €nalist for the National Book
Award, grows out of this disaster and already has the
whiff and feel of folklore. The storm, Smith reminds,
was hardest on those who had the least, many of whom
will never return home again. Inhabiting one voice after
another, she evokes the way total loss can dignify a
paucity of possessions. In other poems, she powerfully
impersonates the storm itself: its bulging, seething
menace; the way it flung people to all corners of America;
how the loss it unleashed felt biblical, a very personal
punishment.” - John Freeman, naming Blood
Dazzler one of NPR’s Top Books of 2008
“ Spiritual
and gutsy, Patricia Smith’s satirical poems lay
New Orleans bare, with Katrina at the driving wheel,
howling and whispering her personsified moments of
destruction and healing. ‘Blood Dazzler’ is
a document of feelings, whose tinges of the blues capture
an urgent witnessing through the natural empathy embedded
in praise, woe, and awe.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
‘
This riveting sequence gives voice to a wild raw whirlwind
that ruined a city and brought on, in turn, a storm of
neglect and murderous indifference. With her radiant
powers of empathy, her fiercely acute ear for the musical
possibilities of American speech, and her undiluted rage,
Patricia Smith makes in Katrina’s wake a sorrowful,
unflinching, and glorious book.”—Mark Doty
“Blood
Dazzler is Patricia Smith’s impassioned lyric chronicle
of a beloved city in peril, a city whose people were
left to die before us all, a people who were the heart
of our country and lifeblood of our culture. After rising
water, winds and abandonment, after our failure and neglect,
comes this symphony of utterance from the ruins: many-voiced,
poignant, sorrowful and fierce. This is poetry taking
the full measure of its task.”—Carolyn Forche
"Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around
and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full
of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion
and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and
Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of
beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you
or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary
event."—Terrance Hayes |
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Teahouse
of the Almighty
A National Poetry Series selection
and winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and Paterson
Poetry Prize.... Judge Edward Sanders said: “I
was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached
the end of the final poem.”
$15.00 + $2 S&H
This book will arrive signed by
the author.
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Reviews
“Smith appears to be that rarest of creatures,
a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry
truly survives on the printed page.”—Publisher
Weekly (starred review!)
“What power. Smith’s poetry is all poetry.
And visceral. Their passion and empathy, their real
worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell
“Blending feather-wisp feelings with knife-sharp
ghetto talk, the poems mightily fuse Walt Whitman’s
‘barbaric yawp’ with the blues.” –Library
Journal
“Of all the poets slammin’ in Def Poetry
Jam and performance poetry and dooking out contestants
repeatedly at the National Poetry Slam, Patricia Smith
has both the literary chops on the page and the spirited
mouth to transcend both. Plain and simple.”—
Bob Arnold, Longhouse Publishers & Booksellers
“Her secret is an absolute comfort in her own
voice—her poems arrive with assurance and force.”—Kwame
Dawes
“These poems are so fierce and tender, so unflinching,
so loud and exquisite, so carefully crafted, so important,
so right-on.”—Elizabeth Alexander
“There seems to be nothing Patricia Smith can't
write a poem about...her inspirations are various and
dazzling. Smith approaches the themes of love, family,
and violence through accessible, graceful language..."--Entertainment
Weekly, Grade: A
“Smith is a speech pathologist’s
wet dream. This is hard-edged, street-wise, hip-swaying
word magic. . . . One cannot look away from the necessity
of these poems, their sheer urgency and risk. One feels
these poems need to happen. --Matthew Siegel, Gulf
Coast, a Journal of Literature and Fine Art
“It’s been some some some some time since
I’ve
read a new book with quite the skill, depth, toughness,
beauty and final loving hand. . . . The book arrived
yesterday and I read it twice, as if there were a choice.
Put this book into every hand and library.” --Bob
Arnold, founder, Longhouse Publishers
“Now it can be said: Patricia Smith is our Gwendolyn
Brooks, inspiring and firing up everywhere she goes.
. . . Teahouse of the Almighty is simply great poetry,
and a testament to who Patricia Smith is, where she’s
been. It’s the sign we’ve been waiting
for, the Book of the Year” --Bob Holman
and Margery Snyder, Your Guide to Poetry, about.com.
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Close
to Death
This collection of persona poems is
both a tribute to and searing elegy for the lives of
black men. Widely used to introduce urban youth to poetry,
C2D includes the jolting signature poem “Undertaker.”
$13.00 + $2 S&H
This book will arrive signed by
the author.
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Reviews
“Smith writes the way Tina Turner sings. . . .
Blues not as comforting lyrics but as truth revealed
in all its rawness … Smith struts with compassion.”
–E. Ethelbert Miller
“Souls rage from the hellfire of the streets,
and Smith effectively captures the language and urgency,
the rhythms and fury.”—Library Journal
“One of today’s most authoritative and
promising African-American poets. This is powerful,
demanding, important work.”—Booklist
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Big
Towns, Big Talk
Infused with an irresistible jazz, these poems beg to
be read aloud. Winner of the prestigious Carl Sandburg
Award, Big Towns is a snapshot of a writer/performer blending
the two seamlessly and reaching the height of her powers.
$10 + $2 S&H
This Book will arrive signed by
the author.
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Reviews
“The voice transcends the individual pain and helps
to nourish us all. These poems are blessings that move
like white light through your veins.”—American
Book Review
“Smith’s work might be compared to some
of Lucille Clifton’s work, with its double edge
of anger and sensuality…the voice that emerges
in these poems is strong, fearless and passionate.”—Choice |
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Life
According to Motown
After five printings, this bestseller, published in 1991,
has been released in a special 20th anniversary edition,
featuring a new introduction by the author. This sparkling
debut was birthed in Chicago's saloon poetry heyday,
when bared souls first took the stage and the whispered
word was "slam." It's a classic by a poetry
slam pioneer.
$16 + $2 S&H
This book will arrive signed by
the author.
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Fiction
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Staten
Island Noir
Edited by Patricia Smith, this is a vital entry into Akashic Books’ groundbreaking
series of original noir anthologies; each book is comprised of all-new stories,
each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Staten Island is the last of the boroughs to be included. The story “When
They Are Done With Us” won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers
of America. Contributors: include Bill Loehfelm, S.J. Rozan, Ted Anthony, Todd
Craig, Ashley Dawson, Bruce DeSilva, Louisa Ermelino, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Michael
Largo, Mike Penncavage, Linda Nieves-Powell, Patricia Smith, Shay Youngblood
and Eddie Joyce. |
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Nonfiction
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Africans
in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery
A companion volume to the groundbreaking PBS series, Africans
in America is a lyrical and thoroughly researched chronicle.
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Reviews
“A
monumental research effort wed with fine writing…ultimately
shaped by Smith’s beautiful narrative.”—Publisher’s
Weekly
“With its vivid language, and historical integrity, Africans
in America is a major contribution to this country’s
written history.”—Michelle Cliff, San Jose
Mercury News |
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Children's
Literature
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Janna
and the Kings
Smith’s debut children’s book, winner of the
Lee & Low Books’ 2003 New Voices Award, is the
story of a young girl’s warm relationship with her
grandfather. After his death, Janna wonders if his life-long
buddies—the “kings” who inhabit the
neighborhood barbershop—will still consider her
a part of their circle. |
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Reviews
" The
love pours through on every page in this elegantly
written tale about a girl who spends Saturdays with
her
grandfather, her king. . . . Sweet and tender, full of
solace."--Family Fun Magazine |
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