PATRICIA SMITH SERIES:

Time Split

Time Split

Patricia Smith

Historical / Historical Fiction / Young Adult

A scientist is working on teleportation when he accidentally produces a time machine. Initially, he vows to never use the machine to go back in time, but finally relents when he decides he could use it to help his mother. He goes back to Germany, just before World War II, to carry out a 'harmless' tinker, but when he returns to his own time zone he finds a world ravaged by global nuclear war.
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Staten Island Noir

Staten Island Noir

Patricia Smith

Historical / Historical Fiction / Young Adult

BONUS: New York's fifth borough finally enters the Noir Series arena, completing the series tour of the world's noirest city. This e-book includes each editor's story from the first four volumes: Brooklyn Noir (Tim McLoughlin), Manhattan Noir (Lawrence Block), Bronx Noir (S.J. Rozan) and Queens Noir (Robert Knighly). Featuring Brand-new stories by: Bill Loehfelm, S.J. Rozan, Ted Anthony, Todd Craig, Ashley Dawson, Bruce DeSilva, Louisa Ermelino, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Michael Largo, Mike Penncavage, Linda Nieves-Powell, Edward Joyce, and Shay Youngblood, and Patricia Smith. Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its 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 geographical area of the book. ASK ANY RESIDENT OF NEW YORK CITY to name the five boroughs and they'll rattle off four with no problem whatsoever, hesitating...
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Teahouse of the Almighty

Teahouse of the Almighty

Patricia Smith

Historical / Historical Fiction / Young Adult

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 judgeFrom 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.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Smith appears to be that rarest of creatures, a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry truly survives on the printed page. Present at the creation of the slam in early-'80s Chicago and included in seminal films and anthologies, Smith (Big Towns, Big Talk, 1992) receded from the scene in recent years after her career as a newspaper journalist ended in scandal. This National Poetry Series–winning volume marks a triumphal return, showing an energetic writer with four urgent subjects. She depicts endangered children. She celebrates sex and sexuality, from the public display of celebrities to the power of the female orgasm: "Don't hate me because I'm multiple." She considers the heritage of black American art, in musical performance and in writing. Finally, she describes the experience of performance itself, with all its pride and embarrassment: "Angry, jubilant, weeping poets... we are all/ saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight." Several poems also animate the troubled lives of famous blues singers; elsewhere, a mother considers how her incarcerated son became a "jailhouse scribe." A superb variety of lines and forms—short and long, hesitant and rapid-fire—gives the book additional depth. Smith even offers fine advice: "Breathe/ like your living depends on it." (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"[A] rich, dense feast of poetry."—Hazel and Wren “Smith appears to be that rarest of creatures, a charismatic slam and performance poet whose artistry truly survives on the printed page. Present at the creation of the slam in early-’80s Chicago and included in seminal films and anthologies, Smith (Big Towns, Big Talk, 1992) receded from the scene in recent years after her career as a newspaper journalist ended in scandal. This National Poetry Series–winning volume marks a triumphal return, showing an energetic writer with four urgent subjects. She depicts endangered children. She celebrates sex and sexuality, from the public display of celebrities to the power of the female orgasm: ‘Don’t hate me because I’m multiple.’ She considers the heritage of black American art, in musical performance and in writing. Finally, she describes the experience of performance itself, with all its pride and embarrassment: ‘Angry, jubilant, weeping poets… we are all/ saviors, reluctant hosannas in the limelight.’ Several poems also animate the troubled lives of famous blues singers; elsewhere, a mother considers how her incarcerated son became a ‘jailhouse scribe.’ A superb variety of lines and forms—short and long, hesitant and rapid-fire—gives the book additional depth. Smith even offers fine advice: ‘Breathe/ like your living depends on it.’” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Smith writes the way Tina Turner sings.” —E. Ethelbert Miller “Teahouse of the Almighty is searing, honest, well-crafted, and full of the real world transformed by Patricia Smith’s fine ear for nuance and the shaking of the soul’s duties. I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem.”—Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judge “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 “Not many poets will make you laugh out loud, grow uneasily warm with the recognition of self, sit riveted by the sheer shock of contending with human suffering, and feel as if you are alone with her as she tells her stories. But not many poets are Patricia Smith and not many books are as delightful and moving as her splendid Teahouse of the Almighty. 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. They can make you gasp, rage, weep, belly-laugh, throw your arms open to them and the worlds they contain, push away or punch at the wrongs they chronicle. They bear such terrible beauty. Brava to Miss Patricia Smith, who pulls poems from the center of the earth.” —Elizabeth Alexander
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Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

Patricia Smith

Historical / Historical Fiction / Young Adult

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 BrooksIn 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.Review“Patricia Smith’s dazzling new book sings Chicago and Detroit, the midcentury migration of African American families northward (They say it’s better up there . . .), to cities both harsh and alluring, cities that offer and withhold, raise hopes and dash them at once. Above all, Smith turns her attention—her passion, her fierce sonic powers—to Motown, that aural mirage, the shimmering promises inherent in ‘every wall of horn, every slick choreographed / swivel . . .’ 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 (‘Motown Crown’ is stunning), 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 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 "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* “First of all, wow. This book is a treasure.”—The California Journal of Women Writers "Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is about the Great Migration, when a half million African Americans left the South and moved to Chicago between 1916 and 1970. [S]mith evokes parents and children in the new urban environment." —*The Pioneer Press* “[A] whole-cloth remembrance, lament, and celebration that is not to be missed.”—Coldfront, “Top 40 Poetry Books of 2012” "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 voice 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* "This is a wry collection of memories of growing up, learning to lie (to get out at night), learning to be sexy, learning to walk just so, learning to hide . . . and then, finally, learning to be proud of who and what she is." —RALPH Mag "Smith’s rhythms create a life-breath almost as potent as Motown’s beat itself. . . . [her] fresh diction is surprising enough to be almost a new language."—Rattle About the AuthorPatricia 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 is also the author of the history Africans in America and the award-winning children’s book Janna and the Kings. She is a professor at the City University of New York, and lives in New Jersey with her husband Bruce DeSilva, granddaughter Mikaila, and two dogs, Brady and Rondo.
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