Patricia Smith is a National Book Award finalist (2008) and the author of six critically acknowledged volumes of poetry. Her awards and honors include the 2014 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress, the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and a 2013 Phillis Wheatley Book Award. A formidable performer, Smith has read her work at venues all over the United States andaround the world. She is a Cave Canem faculty member, an associate professor of English at CUNY/College of Staten Island, and a faculty member in the Sierra Nevada College M.F.A. program.
"As with Smith's previous books, one encounters an urgent voice on
the page that is exuberant, sharp, and questing in its search for
understanding of the fatalities that besiege black life in America.
The imaginative qualities of these poems and others are what make
them captivating. She is a poet of immense originality, and these
poems are a testament to her powers." --Major Jackson, author of
Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn: Poems "Patricia Smith is a masterful
poet, performer, and pundit. And while her chosen field is the form
and grace of language, her gift to the world that orbits the Black
experience is truth. This truth contains three extraordinary
moments: (1) she conceives history in a way that deftly removes the
chaff of lies; (2) seeing this history we know, or at least have
the possibility of knowing, who and what we are; and (3) by taking
us beyond America's ahistorical tendencies the book gives us, many
for the first time, a chance to imagine a future that includes our
flaws and our potentials, all the while balancing the accounts of
tragedy." --Walter Mosley "A tour de force at double the length of
an expected poetry volume, Incendiary Artis bound to be one of this
year's most vital and devastating books, where Smith's historical
sweep, moral invective, and lyrical mastery speak truth to power
and render these trying times unflinchingly... These stirring poems
will make any reader shudder, weep, and strive for an America that
finally regards all of its citizens, to borrow Malcolm X's phrase,
as righteous human beings." --Plume"Smith... creates 'incendiary
art, ' and never have her meticulously structured and fully fueled
poems been more scorching than in this acutely visceral,
empathetically inhabited, and intimately detailed collection. Smith
investigates with excruciating sensitivity and strange beauty the
drowning of two baby black girls by their black fathers, accidental
street shootings of the innocent, and police shootings of unarmed
African Americans. With her latest heroically unflinching poems of
incandescent clarity, Smith joins Angela Jackson and Claudia
Rankine in the tragically growing chorus of poets decrying racial
violence." --Booklist
"Smith exhibits razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her
scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their
emotional weight. This is best captured in 'Elegy, ' a stunning,
long-lined poem about her thick-as-thieves relationship with her
father, who found it difficult to be his wife's 'sky and root.'
Smith's urgent collection lives up to its title, burning bright and
urgent as a bonfire." --Publishers Weekly "Patricia Smith's moving
collection of elegies combines the act of witness with the delights
of lyric poetry, intervening with master narratives of history, or
sociology, to rescue the suffering subject. The rich sonic texture
of the work enables the subtle modulations of mordant wit, anger,
and grief throughout the collection, where feeling is tuned by
assonance and consonance." --Averill Curdy, editor, The Longman
Anthology of Poetry "Incendiary Art is the fire this time. An epic
in five movements where history becomes tragedy, becomes farce,
becomes fable. Where the reader becomes complicit, where outcomes
burn into forgotten memories, and where nobody gets off the hook."
--Marlon James
"Patricia is one of the poets writing today that I most deeply
admire. Her work is always timely, powerful, necessary, and at
turns heartbreaking."
--Natasha Trethewey, author of Thrall: Poems "It's a book of
violence, outrage, grief, despair, a book about racism, that
generalization we never stop packing with the lives that we
destroy... a book of terrible beauty, opulent brutality, immersed
in the contradictions that kindle in and around and in reaction to
black lives and deaths. It's hard to imagine art changing anything
the book describes--hard to imagine it forestalling the next of
these murders or undermining the state's ability to explain away
the next all-too-explainable killing of someone young and
brown--but that impossibility makes these poems more compelling..."
--The Kenyon Review "Smith's new book is possibly her best work to
date." --The Millions
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