Incendiary Art confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men. Dynamic sequences, including a compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, Patricia Smith reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal, visionary book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history now. Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 2018 NAACP Image Award, Incendiary Art was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time. Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives: We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us. The poet’s unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.

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.

"Expert and instinctive, like a cool Ed Wilkerson sax solo bouncing with lived rhythms. Morton's consummate poems will echo long after they are read." -Booklist Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton's debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness. These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker's awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life's toughest questions. Poignant, searching, and earnestly philosophical, Improvisation Without Accompaniment reaches for meaning within life's joys and griefs.

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.

Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton's debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness. These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker's awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life's toughest questions. Poignant, searching, and earnestly philosophical, Improvisation Without Accompaniment reaches for meaning within life's joys and griefs.