Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith chronicles the Great Migration through Motown music and Chicago streets.

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

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

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.

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.